A small circle of attorneys well versed in the Foreign Agents Registration Act have been predicting that the once-obscure statute is not about to exit the limelight. News last week out of the Department of Justice suggests that they are on target.

At a conference in New Orleans Wednesday on white-collar fraud, John Demers, head of the DOJ’s national security division, said the agency was overhauling its FARA team in order to treat it as an enforcement priority. Brandon Van Grack, a former prosecutor on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, will now lead the unit.