I don’t usually make “aside” posts that are this long, but I thought this was important.
“There is no comparison between Donald Trump and any previous president…in terms of selling access to him, his family, and of course, his administration, and selling out American policy in the process. If he wins again in November, if he’s back in the White House, everything in terms of American foreign policy will be for sale to the highest bidder, and of course, that is all too often going to go to the autocrats and dictators who have access to all the money they want because they control access to all of their domestic treasuries and domestic funds…There is no one in American history like Donald Trump. He is an absolute threat to any remaining domestic oversight of American foreign policy.
“This is absolutely a cross-partisan, bi-partisan issue. The reason it has taken so long to tackle so many of these networks is because, unfortunately, it’s not just Republicans, not just Trump, that have been opening the doors to these foreign influence networks: [Democrat] Bob Menendez, one of the long standing and, until recently, leading Democrats in the Senate recently convicted acting as an agent for the Egyptian government; we have another case in the House of Representatives, Henry Cuellar, a Democrat out of the state of Texas, accused of acting as a foreign agent for the government of Azerbaijan…and [NYC Mayor] Eric Adams, also a Democrat, recently indicted for soliciting and accepting…bribes from a foreign official in the country of Turkey.
“When Joe Biden was a candidate, he ran a campaign plank on banning foreign lobbying. It was always going to be an uphill climb. but he’s had his hands full, and it doesn’t seem he’s making much progress on that whatsoever.
“The good news…and I don’t want to sound too much like a partisan here…but I’ve been working in the foreign influence, foreign lobbying space for a while now, and I’ve never seen Kamala Harris’s name pop up in any of these networks, which is absolutely a breath of fresh air, given how deep-seated and cross-partisan so many of these networks are.”
— Casey Michael, author of Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, speaking on Pod Save the World,