South Korea’s rich lobbying spree isn’t paying off in DC

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released in July an interim staff report accusing South Korea of “discriminatory attacks on American-owned businesses.” Seoul’s “practices include coercive investigation tactics, overly burdensome regulatory requirements, and massive fines and penalties intended to punish American businesses and make it harder for them to effectively compete against Korean companies,” the report said. The investigation began in February over Seoul’s handling of a data breach at Coupang, the US-listed e-commerce company, and the committee drew on Coupang’s documents and testimony. Seoul called the report one-sided. But South Korean lawmaker Lee Ki-heon heaped blame on an interesting target: “Why has the Ministry of Foreign Affairs failed to build a human network in the US Congress? Despite investing so much money and time, it’s incomprehensible that a ‘human network’ hasn’t been established. Meeting only with [congressional] aides amid such a major incident is shameful.” Just how much money and time? South Korean lobbying hasn’t usually been top-of-mind in America’s foreign-influence pantheon, but the numbers are getting hard to ignore. As investigative reporter Brody Mullins documented in October, South Korea’s government and affiliated entities spent US$363 million on lobbying and influence in Washington over the past decade, according to OpenSecrets’ tally of Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings. Much of what follows draws on his reporting and the filings behind it. Korea spent nearly $38 million in 2024 alone and at least $11.8 million in the first half of 2026. That’s good for a consistent top-10 finish among FARA spenders, in league with Saudi Arabia and China, whose economy is roughly ten times Korea’s size. Government entities footed nearly two-thirds of the bill for Korea’s decade-long splurge, more than $236 million. From January 2021 through June 2026, the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency dropped an estimated $85 million and the Korea Tourism Organization $33.1 million, while the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy anteed $15.4 million. US Justice Department records clock the Korean Embassy at another $10 million. On the corporate side, it’s a familiar cast of characters, lobbying separately through US subsidiaries that file under the Lobbying Disclosure Act rather than FARA. In 2024, Samsung spent $6.98 million, nearly double its 2021 total, while SK Group spent $5.59 million and Hyundai Motor Group $3.28 million, according to their Senate filings. Mullins counts 29 Washington firms and more than 180 registered foreign agents working for Seoul between 2021 and 2025. The embassy’s principal lobbyist is Thomas Sung-Hoon Kim, who has represented Korea since 2004 through his firm, Thomas Capitol Partners, for about $500,000 a year. The other lobbying heavyweights on Seoul’s payroll include Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, BGR Group, Akin Gump, Mercury Public Affairs, Squire Patton Boggs, Qorvis and DGA Group. Brownstein’s Korea team has included former Democratic Senators Mark Pryor and Mark Begich. Mercury, in particular, has some added stroke in Trumpworld: White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles co-chaired its Florida and Washington offices before joining the administration. Unsurprisingly, shortly after Trump won the 2024 election, the Korean Embassy signed a $240,000-a-year contract with the firm. Money well spent? For one, a high-dollar direct line to the White House. Sometimes that’s a volume game: FARA filings show that beginning January 3, 2025, before Trump’s inauguration, a Mercury lobbyist spoke weekly with National Security Council chief of staff Brian McCormack on Korea’s behalf. The calls continued for nearly six months, until McCormack left the White House in July. But not always: in the second half of 2025, Mercury reported only two contacts for Korea, one with a Homeland Security official and one with a White House aide, while collecting a $120,000 retainer. Slightly less anodyne: it buys a foothold on Capitol Hill. Kim, a US citizen, may legally donate to campaigns, and FARA requires him to disclose those donations. He gives generously to lawmakers whose work touches Korea policy: in the six months ending in November 2025, he made 48 donations to members of Congress and their PACs. Mullins found that from October 2024 to March 2025, every congressional office that received $500 or more from Kim also had staff contacted on Korea’s behalf in the same period. Seoul’s lobbyists work the big stages, too. At the 2024 presidential conventions, they secured credentials for then-Ambassador Cho Hyun-dong at both parties’ gatherings. In Chicago, FARA records show, Korea’s lobbyists at Brownstein used money and party connections to get him into a luxury suite and a skybox, and onto the convention floor. Their targets included senior members of the Senate Judiciary, Senate Foreign Relations and House Armed Services committees, and they arranged meetings with the House’s second-ranking Democrat and a senior appropriator to discuss the defense authorization bill. The ambassador attended the Republican convention as well, but the records do not show whom he met there. Among the most active of these lobbyists is Ed Royce, the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who joined Brownstein in 2020 and registered as a foreign agent for Korea the next year. Since March 2023, FARA records document more than 1,700 contacts by Royce with lawmakers, aides and other officials on Seoul’s behalf, including hundreds of emails and scores of calls to his former committee staff. In 2024, more than 350 emails went out inviting members of Congress to an event with the speaker of Korea’s National Assembly; in 2025, Royce sent more than 100 seeking meetings with the Korean ambassador. And more troubling still: Korean lobbying tries, and largely fails, to shape congressional investigations. Here, the House Judiciary Committee report on South Korea’s discrimination against American businesses, released in July, is the paradigm case. FARA records show that lobbyists from Squire Patton Boggs contacted Trace Mitchell, a senior staff lawyer on the Judiciary subcommittee that co-authored the report, roughly a dozen times by email, phone and text between February and June, while the investigation was underway. The advocacy in this case may have fallen on deaf ears – but that’s certainly not for lack of trying. Whatever else might be said about Seoul’s lobbying operation, want of a well-connected “human network” of Washington insiders hardly seems its defining weakness. Jack Kieffaber, a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, is an adjunct professor at George Mason University and the Catholic University of America specializing in the intersection of technology and law.