"Defending Democracy Together"

A big story this morning is that Bill Kristol has been outed as the recipient of millions of dollars of USAID (closed as of this morning!) and State Department money, laundered through the Rockfeller Philanthropy Advisors foundation. 

A part of this story nobody has yet mentioned that I've seen is that the particular focus of the Kristol entity is anti-Trump politics. This is the US government (in)directly funding political operations against a disfavored political party/candidate.

Back before Trump came into power, Kristol was headlining a conference on American and Israeli Nationalism. Shockingly given his remarks on the subject since Trump became a leading figure, he was at the time a huge proponent of American Nationalism -- the conference was called "The Case for Nationalism" and he was the leading exponent of the American version. Once Trump came on the scene, he discovered that there was a lot more money to be made opposing the principle he had once intensely advocated. We knew, therefore, that he was not genuinely principled. 

But this rises above the level of scandal. This is money laundering US taxpayer funds into an active effort to inveigh against the election of a particular candidate in our internal elections. It is almost certainly illegal. Especially insofar as USAID's budget is informed by input from a certain intelligence agency, it is explicitly illegal for them to engage in information operations within the United States for the purposes of influencing American citizens. Even to the degree that influence cannot be shown in court, the administrative state funding efforts to sway voters on a partisan basis is going to violate who knows how many campaign finance laws.