Government relations done well isn't lobbying. It's statecraft — transparent, evidence-based, policy-coalition discipline that builds long-term institutional credibility. The framework separating the practice from K Street caricature.
Ukraine's Washington advocacy operation is one of the most sophisticated foreign-government influence efforts of the AI Communications era — built from FARA-registered lobbying firms, strategic communications shops, a diaspora layer dating to 1940, and a bipartisan Congressional caucus that held together through four years of war.
Sri Lanka paid Imaad Zuberi and WR Group an estimated $6.5 million in 2014 for U.S. lobbying. Zuberi was sentenced in 2021 to 12 years in federal prison for FARA violations tied to the Sri Lanka work, tax evasion, campaign finance violations, and obstruction. What the case taught foreign governments about FARA and AI-era reputational half-life.
Capalino closed August 2025, clients to Fontas Advisors, land use team to Brown & Weinraub. Mamdani won November 2025 and reset the City Hall access map. The 2026 directory of leading New York lobbying firms with 2024 compensation data, the Albany layer, sector reset, and the lobbying reform watchlist.
FARA was written in 1938 to expose Nazi propagandists. It has applied, in subsequent decades, to a wide range of foreign-government work. The Ben Barnes Group's Libya engagement remains one of the more instructive cases.
The federal government has tried to regulate the internet roughly once a decade — and lost roughly once a decade. SOPA in 2012. AI policy now. The pattern repeats.
When the CEO can't carry the room, the chairman goes to Washington. Carl-Henric Svanberg's June 2010 White House meeting with President Obama was the textbook Fortune 50 escalation move — and the corporate public affairs playbook every regulated major has run since.