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You've heard the news.
Here's what to make of it.
My name is Casey Michelle.
I am the director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights foundation, and I cover and investigate foreign influence and foreign lobbying networks in the United States.
The mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, was indicted in a sprawling indictment for allegedly working on the behalf of partners and benefactors in Turkey and opening the floodgates to foreign financing for the New York mayor's office.
It is illegal for any foreign nationals from any country outside the United States of America to donate any amount of money to any American official to any American political campaign.
That is a clear red flag.
But as we saw in this indictment, Eric Adams is accused not only of accepting significant sums from foreign nationals, but of directing his staff to specifically cultivate networks of foreign financing that would flow directly to him and his campaigns both before and after he was elected as mayor of New York City.
So it is, of course, extremely shocking, much of it unprecedented.
But at the end of the day, much of it was actually unsurprising.
This was something that a lot of folks who have been following foreign influence networks or foreign lobbying networks have been absolutely concerned about that we would someday see.
You know, this has been the kind of sum of all fears for those who have been covering foreign influence and foreign lobbying campaigns for years.
It's not just that foreign regimes can and have freely and legally hired lobbyists on the ground in the United States of America to do their bidding, but because of the broken and opaque nature of American campaign fundraising at every level of American government, the ultimate concern was that foreign governments and foreign regimes would find a way to inject their own funding, their own financing into American political campaigns.
And foreign influence, foreign manipulation, even foreign lobbying, are things all Americans should absolutely be concerned about.