Max Boot Called Trump a Foreign Asset. Now His Wife Is Indicted for Just That.A shocking indictment against a policy insider — and what it says about foreign influence in the Beltway.
By Michael Schaffer
08/02/2024 05:00 AM EDT
As allegations of foreign meddling roiled the Donald Trump presidency, Washington Post columnist Max Boot blasted the 45th president as a Russian stooge — and urged the feds to get tough.
“Washington should ramp up enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and expand U.S. counterintelligence efforts against foreign influence, not just espionage,” Boot wrote in a 2019 column. The government, he said, should “change its focus from encouraging compliance to punishing noncompliant parties.”
Five years later, he might want to rethink that one.
In a delicious story twist that has lit up pro-Trump media, Boot’s wife and occasional co-author, the former CIA analyst and longtime Asia policy expert Sue Mi Terry, has herself now been charged with two felony counts of serving as an unregistered agent for a foreign power.
According to a sweeping indictment unsealed last month, Terry spent more than a decade taking instructions from South Korea’s intelligence agency before publishing articles in prestige media, organizing conferences at top think tanks and arranging networking events to give Korean operatives access to Washington players — and then allegedly accepted pricey Louis Vuitton and Bottega Veneta handbags, as well as money for her think tank programs, in exchange for her service. One of the columns in question was co-written with Boot in the Post.
As Boot demanded, it’s about noncompliance, not espionage. Being paid to say nice things about a foreign government is perfectly legal. You just have to register under FARA. ...
POLITICO 
