As a retired Political consultant, I know a bit about the mindset of political candidates, only on the Democratic side. So what keeps me awake at night? Firstly, Putin has shown that he can be an asset in a political campaign. In the campaigns I worked in we always had an
opposition researcher. Putin has a state financed intelligence service available to him, that is so much more advanced than any opposition researcher. They can from Russia away from American justice, can hack and leak, steal documents, create fake documents, deploy assets to
spread rumors (all of which he did in 2016 and 2020) It swung the 2016 election, but the press was smarter in 2020 and he was less effective, Still the Biden Ukraine corruption smear went pretty far and was pushed in right wing media. Bottom line, who wouldn't want a state
sponsored intel service working on your behalf in a campaign? Secondly, Putin has a great digital operation he can put to work for a campaign, sophisticated and financed by Russia, and again out of the reach of US law, both civil and criminal. Therefore unbound by the
constraints of domestic operatives who worry about law suits, or criminal prosecution. Third, as the Lev and Igor case demonstrated, there is Russian money available, most likely given to dark money super pacs. Now this leads me to what keeps me up at night. People who seek
the presidency are ambitious most are honest principled decent people, but a few are so ambitious that they just might be tempted (as I suspect Trump was) to cross the line, to knowingly conspire with a foreign adversary to win the presidency. After all Putin may just be the
the most advantageous political endorsement (silently and secretly of course) that an ambitious political candidate could secure. Now Putin is not going to back a Democrat, he has invested too much in reshaping the R party into a radical, racist, divisive party supporting
Authoritarianism. Are there candidates in the R party now so ambitious as to put aside their loyalty to USA to gain the Presidency? Would Cruz, would Hawley, we have already seen their actions on Jan. 6th. What keeps me awake is that Putin has proven to be an effective asset
and Trump demonstrated that there is not much downside in R base to associating with Putin (with plausible deniability of course). I'm a Hawk on airing out Trump Putin corruption, all of it, and going after those like Giuliani who obviously became a tool of Russian intel op
in laundering Russian disinformation in an attempt to smear Biden. With out holding those to task, and the higher ups who pushed the insurrection, there will be R candidates who avail themselves of Putin's help in the future.
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