Forget Russia. Here’s the Real Threat to American Elections…

Alleluia!

We join with all Americans today in breathing a sigh of relief; justice is being done.

The bad guys are being hunted down. Our pristine democracy — in its pure white, unblemished, unsullied, and unbelievable gown — is being protected.

Finally, at least one of our foreign enemies has been nabbed by the gendarmes and will soon be railroaded by the courts; others will surely follow.

The perp is Russian national Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova. The feds claim she is responsible for overseeing the funds for a Russian conspiracy to meddle in US elections.

And now, too, Donald Trump and Mike Pence are after the Chinese, who — as we just learned last week — are also trying to subvert the will and wisdom of the American people.

More on both of those stories in a minute…

Chinese meddling

We’re back in Ireland after a week in Bermuda. It wasn’t a vacation. Instead, we got together with old friends…and the whole team of researchers and analysts who work with our Legacy Research Group.

We also met TV personalities Glenn Beck and John Stossel, and listened to two days of speeches and panel discussions.

We gave you a version of our speech, as we had prepared it. But as we listened to the other speakers, we revised and rewrote…to address the issues raised by other speakers.

And as we revised, we began to see more clearly how the pieces fit together. More about that tomorrow…along with our takeaways on cryptocurrencies, pot stocks, gold, commodities, and much more…

But today, we begin the week by looking at the latest news. From Reuters:

‘US President Donald Trump on Wednesday accused China of seeking to meddle in the Nov. 6 US congressional elections, saying Beijing did not want his Republican Party to do well because of his pugnacious stance on trade.’

Yes, America’s president says China’s got it in for him. No details were offered, however.

We were left to wonder how the Chinese might meddle…Would they send out fake news? Or true stories?

Or was the whole ‘Chinese meddling’ idea a form of fake news itself, intended to…well…meddle with the next election results?

The whole idea of interfering with the US elections takes our breath away. Every clown on the planet interferes. One writes a letter to the editor. Another posts something silly on the internet. A third makes a campaign contribution.

Fantasy, prevarication, and confusion — that’s what elections are all about!

And while the experts have been unable to find any traces of Chinese meddling, in the case of Russian meddling, they say they have more smoking guns than at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Information warfare

Millions of dollars have been spent on the Russian meddling meme. Millions of hours of research, investigation, and testimony…and billions of hours of the public’s most limited resource — its time — have been invested in the issue.

And on Friday, the federales finally collared a Russian woman, a US resident — the above-mentioned Khusyaynova. The papers summarized the charges against her as — are you ready for this? — ‘information warfare.’

What exactly is information warfare? A capital crime? A misdemeanour?

Is it when you drop propaganda from bombers? Or is it like Radio Free Europe, where you send messages to citizens of other countries to try to give them a second opinion?

Frankly, we didn’t know there was a law against it. Au contraire, we thought it was protected by the First Amendment.

Nevertheless, Reuters reports that the G-men grabbed the desperado and are preparing to perp-walk her right to jail:

‘Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, 44, became the first person charged with a crime for attempting to interfere in the 2018 US elections, according to a government official with knowledge of the investigation.’

Biggest interferer

Maybe the crime busters got the wrong person. As near as we can tell, the biggest interferer — apart from the candidates and the political parties themselves — is casino mogul and Israeli citizen Sheldon Adelson.

The Huffington Post put Adelson’s spending on the 2012 race at $150 million. And Bloomberg reports that Adelson is responsible for donating more than $100 million to this year’s midterms alone.

The money keeps flowing…from the poor punters putting their quarters in Adelson’s Las Vegas slot machines to the rich politicos inside the Beltway.

Compared to the money Adelson spends, the Russkies’ budget (reported to be $10 million for all of 2018) is pathetic.

And the papers reported over the weekend that between them, Republicans and Democrats have on-hand some $623 million more to spend on this year’s midterm races — every penny fully intending to upset the results.

It was as if the Internal Revenue Service announced a crackdown on Wall Street tax evasion…and arrested a kid with a lemonade stand on nearby Beaver Street just to let everyone know it was serious.

And here, we stand up in support of what is right, fair, and virtuous. That is, we stand with the meddlers. If Adelson and other meddlers want to spend their money getting some pliant jackass elected — well, that’s the American way!

Nom de plume

But the Russians are wasting their money. According to the press reports, they used ‘fake personas on social media to stoke arguments about race and other contentious issues.’

Whoa!

But wait…When did it become a crime to use a nom de plume? And how is stirring up controversy different from what shock jocks, provocateurs, telephone callers, presidential candidates, and practically everyone else does?

But let’s look more closely…Maybe we’ll see what this is all about.