Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Harlow shuts down WH official: Stop attacking the press or this interview will end" video.
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At the turn of the 18th century, John Adams, the newly elected president of the United States—only the 2nd in the nation’s then-brief history—cautioned the American people about “the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.” In particular, John Adams pointed to threats from abroad, warning that if a changed election outcome “can be obtained by foreign nations by flattery or menaces, by fraud or violence, by terror, intrigue, or venality, the Government may not be the choice of the American people, but of foreign nations. It may be foreign nations who govern us, and not we, the people, who govern ourselves.” Speaking before a joint session of Congress, he pleaded with the Senate and the House to preserve our Constitution from its natural enemies,” including “the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments.”
The threat of foreign influence over our elections did not go away in the 220 years since John Adams spoke those words. Today we have a president whose election was aided by the fraud and Malice of a foreign nation. Americans who watched how Trump, in the words of John McCain, “abased himself … abjectly before a tyrant” in Helsinki, cannot be faulted for wondering whether John Adams’s long-ago warning has become a reality.
US law bans foreign nationals from donating to political campaigns, but they can circumvent the restrictions by routing financial support through anonymous bank accounts, shell corporations, and front companies. it is easy to set up a company without disclosing its purpose or the identity of its true owners.
Foreign adversaries can then use these companies to execute anonymous financial transactions that facilitate attacks on free and fair democratic elections.
A network of shell corporations could be used to hide the origin of foreign funds pumped into a political action committee, or a social media political ad campaign. The Kremlin has long had expertise in this area. During the Soviet Union’s heyday, the KGB perfected the craft of anonymously moving funds to seed foreign political campaigns. The FSB and the GRU, the KGB successors, are well-versed in these techniques as well.
Law enforcement and congressional investigations have revealed that Kremlin-linked actors paid considerable sums of money to support Trump and curry his favor. A Russian organization controlled by an oligarch close to Putin spent more than $1 million a month just on social media campaigns favoring Trump, according to the special counsel.
A Russian American energy tycoon—who boasted to a Kremlin official in July 2016 of being “actively involved in Trump’s election campaign”—donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Trump Victory fund. And a company affiliated with a sanctioned Russian oligarch paid $1 million to Michael Cohen, then Trump’s personal lawyer, for unspecified services after the election. These and other transactions examined throughout the report establish that, during the campaign and presidential transition, Trump had several compromising financial entanglements with actors representing a hostile foreign power.
Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov’s transferred $20 million to an American bank account just days after a meeting that he organized between Trump senior campaign officials, including Manafort, Kushner, and a Russian government attorney. Hackers, troll farms, and spies cannot operate without money. Following the money trail helps investigators discover who is funding these entities.
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