A chilling new report outlines how Russia, China and other authoritarian regimes have used weaknesses in campaign finance and financial reporting laws to launch attacks on the political processes in the United States and elsewhere.
The report, released last week by the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, found that authoritarian regimes spent more than $300 million in the past decade on dozens of interference campaigns.
Among the foreign powers' methods of attack: government-funded disinformation; funneling money to campaigns through straw donors, nonprofits and shell companies; and providing in-kind donations to U.S. and other Western politicians.
Most of these incidents occurred in the past four years, researchers found.
The report comes as security experts focus on protecting the 2020 presidential race from a reprise of the efforts to hack election systems in 2016. And it includes numerous recommendations for U.S. policy makers, including passage of several pieces of legislation that were introduced in response to cybersecurity concerns raised four years ago.
While the focus has been on cybersecurity, these experts say Russia and China have also been exploiting financial loopholes that allow foreign money to seep into the American political system.
Examples of what the authors call "malign finance" include:
- Providing in-kind contributions to influence candidates and office holders. The most prominent effort involving the United States was President Trump's request for negative information from Ukraine on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his family — the cause of Trump's impeachment. But U.S. law is not clear on whether getting dirt on a political opponent is a "thing of value" that constitutes a reportable contribution. What's needed, they argue, is a broader interpretation in U.S. campaign finance law — or a revision to the law — to clarify that a "thing of value" includes political information. The report calls closing this loophole "the single most urgent reform" that the authors recommend.
- Requiring campaigns to report contacts with foreign agents. The SHIELD Act, introduced and passed last year in the Democratic-controlled House on a party-line vote, would institute such requirements. The bill has not advanced in the GOP-controlled Senate.
- Outlaw secret shell companies and restrict U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies. This is a key way that foreign money gets introduced into U.S. campaigns, the report states.
- Disclose foreign donors to nonprofits. Foreign powers hide donations by giving the money to a nonprofit that in turn provides it to a candidate or office holder while not having to disclose the source of the funds. Numerous legislative efforts to require disclosure of so-called dark money contributions have failed.
Other proposals include requiring disclosure of the source of funding for online political ads and requiring disclosure of foreign funding sources to U.S. media companies.
The authors say they hope exposing financial loopholes that allow foreign governments to interfere in our politics "will jumpstart a policy reform initiative to build resilience against this threat."
"There is no time to lose," they conclude. "Just like airplanes in the summer of 2001 and cyberattacks in the summer of 2016, the system is currently blinking red about incoming rubles and yuan."
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.