Perspective: Election securityCampaign Finance Enforcement Is an Essential Component of National Security
Russia is at it again, so this week’s campaign finance enforcement action – in which two Russian-born associates of Rudy Giuliani have been indicted and arrested for violating campaign finance laws, including allegedly funneling Russian money into the main pro-Trump political action committee (PAC) — could not have come at a more important time for defending American democracy from foreign interference. The 2016 presidential election was subject to “sweeping and systematic” interference, and the next presidential election is just a year away with the FBI warning that “the Russians are absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections.”
Two Soviet-born associates of Rudy Giuliani have been indicted and arrested for violating campaign finance laws, including allegedly funneling Russian money into the main pro-Trump political action committee (PAC). Joshua Rudolph writes in Just Security that this is a tactic we have seen Russia deploy elsewhere, particularly in Europe.
“This week’s strong enforcement of the law should help deter this kind of foreign interference in U.S. elections,” he writers. “To underscore this deterrence and reinforce its importance for national security, any related conduct in the United States should also be investigated, along with non-monetary ‘things of value’ contributed by foreigners in connection to U.S. elections. The cross-cutting nature of this apparent foreign influence campaign also demonstrates why the United States needs to address this challenge with a holistic national security framework.”
He adds:
This week’s campaign finance enforcement action could not have come at a more important time for defending American democracy from foreign interference. The 2016 presidential election was subject to “sweeping and systematic” interference, and the next presidential election is just a year away with the FBI warning that “the Russians are absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections.”
Whereas cyberattacks and information operations were Russia’s most salient attack vectors in 2016, reporting over the past year highlights the increasingly common use of malign finance to interfere in democracies. Russia made loans to a political party in France, established ties to the top donor in Britain, offered of derogatory information on an opponent in the United States in 2016, provided “material support” to a lawmaker in Germany, negotiated with Italians to funnel oil profits to a political party, and nurtured extremist websites in Sweden and other European member states. Looking across these and two dozen similar cases over the past decade, the pattern suggests greater frequency, higher dollar amounts, and more brazen criminality.
This backdrop demonstrates the national security imperative of enforcing the laws we have against foreign political contributions, particularly after the mixed signals that have emerged from the Trump administration in recent months.
Rudolph, who, with Jessica Brandt, co-authored “A New National Security Framework for Foreign Interference” (Just Security, 27 September 2019), concludes:
My colleague and I recently warned that Trump administration officials have been normalizing the idea that soliciting foreign interference in a U.S. election won’t be prosecuted, and we argued that this multifaceted challenge calls for a broader national security perspective. This week’s enforcement is both a welcome corrective to that trend and a demonstration of the important role campaign finance enforcement should play as one line of defense within that broader framework. There’s a lot of work to be done.
