Category Archives: chicanery
Today’s Must Read: “Exclusive: Read the Previously Undisclosed Plan to Counter Russian Hacking on Election Day”
Quite a wow from Time:
President Obama’s White House quietly produced a plan in October to counter a possible Election Day cyber attack that included extraordinary measures like sending armed federal law enforcement agents to polling places, mobilizing components of… Continue reading
“Hacking the Vote: Who Helped Whom?”
NYR Daily:
Similarly, bots can be programmed to search for certain keywords and particular users. That could account for why Russian bots were propagating anti-Clinton messages in places like Wisconsin: they might have simply been following the lead of other… Continue reading
Applying the Foreign Solicitation Ban Against the Russian Government Consistent with the First Amendment
One issue which has arisen over possible campaign finance charges against Donald Trump Jr. concerns whether the statute is substantially overbroad in violation of the First Amendment. Eugene Volokh makes the case here, and I argue against application of… Continue reading
“Fake news microtargeting now part of Russia investigation”
KCRW- To the Point:
“Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop.” “Democrats want to impose Sharia law in Florida” These are just some of the headlines you may have seen online last fall. Among… Continue reading
“Former Clinton and Romney campaign chiefs join forces to fight election hacking”
WaPo:
The former managers of Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns are leading a new initiative called “Defending Digital Democracy” in the hopes of preventing a repeat of Russia’s 2016 election interference.
Robby Mook, Clinton’s 2016 campaign chief, and… Continue reading
“The 2016 U.S. Voting Wars: From Bad to Worse”
I have posted this new draft on SSRN (for the pre-APSA event, Protecting Electoral Security and Voting Rights: The 2016 U.S. Elections in Comparative Perspective). Here is the abstract:
If the “voting wars” which have broken out across the… Continue reading
Will Trump Jr’s Ignorance of Campaign Finance Law Let Him Off The Hook? What About Manafort?
Andy Grewal makes a careful and good case that based on what we know, there might not be enough wilfulness on the part of Donald Trump Jr. for him to be criminally prosecuted. This is an important point and much… Continue reading
150,000 Attempts on Election Day to Hack into South Carolina Voter Database
WSJ:
To understand the scale of the hacking attempts against election systems in the 2016 presidential election, consider South Carolina.
On Election Day alone, there were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the state’s voter-registration system, according to a postelection report… Continue reading
“Russia will be back. Here’s how to hack-proof the next election.”
Former National Security Adviser Tom Donilon in WaPo:
We now know that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a comprehensive effort to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. This mission involved the cybertheft and strategic publication of politically sensitive emails,… Continue reading
Republican FEC Commissioners Reject Comm’r Weintraub Proposal for Foreign Interference Rulemaking
Statement of reasons:
The specter of any foreign government meddling in U.S. elections is an issue that we, like all Americans, take very seriously. Contributions and expenditures by foreign nationals in connection with U.S. elections are prohibited by the Federal… Continue reading
Updated: Witness at Meeting: Trump Jr. Asked Russian Attorney “for evidence of illicit money flowing to the Democratic National Committee”
AP reports.
Update: The updated version of the AP story now reads:
In his first public interview about the meeting, Akhmetshin said he accompanied Veselnitskaya to Trump Tower where they met an interpreter who participated in the meeting. He said… Continue reading
Bauer: “Considering the Legal Defenses of the Trump Jr. Meeting”
Bob Bauer at Just Security.
Tokaji: “What Trump Jr. Did Was Bad, But It Probably Didn’t Violate Federal Campaign Finance Law”
Dan Tokaji at Just Security.