former Chief of Staff for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), is a lobbyist for the firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck (BHFS), where he works as a foreign agent representing the interests of the Egyptian government. The Egyptian government is led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who came to power through a military coup in 2013. The government and its lobbyists continue to press the United States for billions of dollars of military and economic assistance, despite the country’s widespread and systematic human rights abuses, as documented by the State Department in its annual country report on human rights The Egyptian government first hired BHFS to represent it in November 2020, and it has paid the firm a monthly fee of $65,000.The Egyptian Government’s Gross and Systematic Violations of Human RightsSince the overthrow of Egypt’s democratically elected government in 2013, the country has been engulfed in a human rights crisis without parallel in modern Egyptian history. The government is responsible for the world’s second-largest mass killing of protesters, massacring approximately 1,150 Egyptians in Rabaa and Al-Nahdha Squares in August 2013. Egypt’s military-controlled government has detained tens of thousands of Egyptians deemed too critical of the government because of their political affiliation or for simply engaging in independent writing and speech. It has carried out numerous extrajudicial executions and torture of detainees, particularly in the Sinai, where it has engaged in armed conflict against armed groups there for nearly ten years, demolishing thousands of homes and acres of farmland. Without any semblance of due process, the government has employed enforced disappearances and endlessly renewed “pretrial detentions,” which in many cases have lasted for more than five years, of thousands of detainees. The judiciary lacks independence, issuing lengthy prison sentences and even mass death sentences with little review in highly politicized trials. Inhumane prison conditions have led to scores of detainee deaths. The government has shuttered hundreds of civil society groups and news publications; jailed journalists, human rights investigators, writers, artists, and actors; and passed draconian “cybercrime” and “counter-terrorism” laws with stiff sentences for protest, assembly, and speech. The military has moved in to exert control over nearly all civilian government and many economic functions.Nonetheless, the Egyptian government is one of the biggest recipients of foreign military assistance from the United States, receiving an average of $1.3 billion yearly since 1987, primarily in the form of American-made weapons. Over the past two decades, members of the U.S. Congress have sought to limit or condition that aid, especially in recent years, given the Egyptian government’s unprecedented crackdown on freedom of expression and civil and political rights. Rather than ending or at least mitigating these abuses, the Egyptian government is throwing money into a lobbying effort to ensure that it continues to receive U.S. aid, despite failing to meet minimum human rights standards set forth by Congress and U.S. law for receiving this assistance.