During the Soviet Union’s heyday, the KGB perfected the craft of anonymously moving funds to seed foreign political campaigns. The Kremlin has long had expertise in this area.
For example, a network of shell corporations could be used to hide the origin of foreign funds pumped into a political action committee (PAC) or a social media political ad campaign.
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Foreign adversaries can then use these companies to execute anonymous financial transactions that facilitate attacks on free and fair democratic elections. Such maneuvering does not require a brilliant financial mind or a suite of high-tech instruments: In many places, including the United States, it is easy to set up a company without disclosing its purpose or the identity of its true owners. 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, front companies, and other opaque transaction vehicles. Any financial support from abroad, therefore, would have had to be creatively obscured. While these two campaigns aligned in their goal-Trump’s victory 3-overt monetary contributions from Russia would have drawn regulatory scrutiny, not to mention public ire. Trump’s campaign to win the presidency required money, as did the Kremlin’s campaign to help him. 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. Americans who watched how President Donald Trump, in the words of the late Sen. The threat of foreign influence over our elections did not wane in the intervening 220 years: Today, the United States has a president whose election was aided by the fraud and intrigue of a foreign nation. Senate and the House of Representatives to “ 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.” 1 It may be foreign nations who govern us, and not we, the people, who govern ourselves.” Speaking before a joint session of Congress, he thus pleaded with the U.S. At the turn of the 18th century, a newly elected president of the United States-only the second 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.
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