Inspector General Warns Of Foreign Money Influencing US Elections

The Inspector General's office at the Federal Elections Commission is warning that foreign money could easily influence US elections. They are confident that this isn't currently happening, but they did warn that the lax oversight and failure to properly money political money in the United States is leaving us wide open for a potential "money bomb" from a foreign country. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening and what we can do to prevent other countries from buying our elections.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The Inspector General's office at the federal elections commission, released a report earlier this week saying that the United States is a prime target for foreign election influence by way of foreign money being donated to candidates. Now it is illegal for a foreign outfit to pour money into US elections. We have laws against that. So why is the Inspector General at the place that enforces these laws worried about this? They know that they have the laws in place. Well, the Inspector General said that's actually the problem. Our laws are not very strong and of course we're not enforcing any of them. We're not investigating what needs to be investigated. We're just sitting here basically doing nothing even when we get reports like one from ProPublica, not that long ago, that outlined multiple instances of foreign outfits putting money into the 2020 election. And that yielded exactly zero investigations from the federal elections commission. And before everybody tries to jump down my throat, no folks, I am not just talking about Russia.

We are talking about money from all over the world that as the Inspector General says, can just come and go freely from US elections because the FEC is not doing its job and making sure that this doesn't happen. Now that's a terrifying thought, right? Now, I also know we have plenty of folks here in this country who say, yeah, but the US interferes in foreign elections all the time, so, okay. Yeah, they do and that's stupid and horrible that they do that. That doesn't mean that we want to open the flood gates and say, okay, everybody y'all come do to us what we've been doing to you. Nobody should be influencing another country's elections, regardless of which country is doing what. That's always a horrible idea. But this is how it's going to be because we have Citizens United because we have McCutcheon because we have super PACs and dark money. And as long as those things continue to exist, we are going to leave ourselves wide open to foreign influence. But I gotta wonder, is foreign influence even as bad as the corporate influence that we already see in our elections?

You know, what does it matter if Italy comes and dumps $10 million in our election cycle, when Exxon and BP and Chevron are dumping 50 million in there, right? If a foreign country is trying to sway United States elections to their favor, and that's a bad thing, then so too should it be a bad thing when Exxon does it or Amazon does it, or Facebook does it. All corporate money, all foreign money, should be out of American politics because I got to tell you, I am much more frightened of corporations controlling our politics than foreign countries electing somebody who's gonna, you know, go easy on them. I'd almost rather see the latter happen than the former. But it is what it is. As long as we refuse to investigate where corporate money or PAC money or dark money's coming from in elections, we're going to open ourselves up to influence. As long as we continue to just allow unlimited fund money in these elections, we're going to continue to be vulnerable. We know the solution. We're just too cowardly as a nation to make that decision.