Executive Summary In recent years, U.S. government officials have normalized a damaging notion: that soliciting or participating in foreign interference in a U.S. election will not be prosecuted. Foreign governments from Beijing to Moscow and else [...]
The contest with authoritarianism requires the United States to understand its strengths. Upon winning the presidency, Joe Biden promised to lead “not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.” That pledge is important, because [...]
Executive Summary: Mobilize the Regulatory Arsenal The incoming Biden administration has signaled through speeches, articles, and interviews that one of its top policy priorities will be combating corruption and kleptocracy.See Vice President Joe [...]
Every December, the Alliance for Securing Democracy team tries to take a step back and look at the foreign interference landscape, and to take stock of where new laws and policies would have the greatest impact at strengthening our institutions from [...]
The United States Congress passed the William M. Thornberry Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, an annual bill (generally known as the NDAA) that designates funding for the Department of Defense, on a bipartisan basis. Priorities outline [...]
On December 10, the Alliance for Securing Democracy hosted a virtual event with Ambassador Eric Edelman, Ambassador Samantha Power, and Dr. Kori Schake on steps the United States can take to regain the initiative in the emerging competition with aut [...]
Ambassador Eric Edelman, Distinguished Practitioner-in-Residence at John Hopkins’ Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies, Co-Chair of ASD’s Offset Strategy for Democracies Task Force Ambassador Samantha Power, Anna Lindh Professor of the Practi [...]
Co-Director Zack Cooper and Oriana Skylar Mastro write that the Biden administration needs to rethink the entire nature of alliances for an era of heavy-handed economic diplomacy from Beijing. Australia's trials are not the first time Beijing has u [...]
Testimony before the European Union Parliament, Special Committee on Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union, including Disinformation December 2, 2020 Josh Rudolph, Fellow for Malign Finance, Alliance for Securing Dem [...]
Malign Finance Fellow Josh Rudolph joined "The Power Vertical" to discuss the findings of his new report, Covert Foreign Money. They’ve granted loans to a French political party. They’ve spread around oil profits in Italy. They’ve given material s [...]
In mid-2020, the Alliance for Securing Democracy convened a task force of 30 leading American national security and foreign policy experts to devise a national strategy for the United States to offset autocratic advances in non-military domains of [...]
ASD Fellow for Malign Finance Josh Rudolph joined Levi Gundert and Jesse Spiro in a panel discussion on the role of cryptocurrency in election interference at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). [...]
ASD Fellow for Malign Finance Josh Rudolph joined Gemma Rogers of Fintrail and Edward Lucas of CEPA to discuss how covert foreign money has undermined the democratic process in North America and Europe in a panel at the Royal United Services Institu [...]
Malign Finance Fellow Josh Rudolph gave a lecture entitled "Subverting Elections: A Toolkit of Foreign Interference" at Middlebury College's Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs. [...]
This week, GMF's "Out of Order" hands the mic over to Josh Rudolph, the Malign Finance fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the author of the new report, Covert Foreign Money. Josh is joined by Luke Harding, best-selling author and seni [...]
This policy paper was co-authored with Edgar P. Tam, visiting senior fellow at the Paris Office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Please click the link at the right to view the full paper. President Donald Trump’s views on Iran hav [...]
Fellow for Malign Finance Josh Rudolph discusses how the rise of foreign funding distorts politics in the West, drawing on our recently released paper Covert Foreign Money: Financial Loopholes Exploited by Authoritarians to Fund Political Interferen [...]
Thursday, October 1, 2020 | 10:00am-11:00am EDT / 4:00pm-5:00pm CEST / 5:00pm-6:00pm EEST Register here. Please join the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the European Centre of Excellence on Hybrid Threats in Helsinki for a virtual, interactive [...]
ASD Middle East Fellow Ariane Tabatabai gives readers a short introduction to her recently released report Iran's Authoritarian Playbook: The Tactics, Doctrine, and Objectives behind Iran’s Influence Operations. In one of the first comprehensive di [...]
Introduction According to a 2013 indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice, hackers backed by a foreign power gained access to the controls of the Bowman Avenue Dam, a small dam in the New York City suburb of Rye, New York. Cyberattacks on inf [...]
Josh Rudolph appeared on the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University's The Europe Desk podcast to discuss malign finance in politics. [...]
Fellow for Malign Finance Josh Rudolph appeared on C-SPAN to discuss malign finance and its role in foreign interference. Related reading: Covert Foreign Money by Josh Rudolph and Thomas Morley [...]
ASD Director Laura Rosenberger sat down with Gabrielle Sierra of the Council on Foreign Relations to discuss efforts the United States has taken since 2016 to secure the integrity of our political system on CFR's Why It Matters Podcast. [...]
"A chilling new report outlines how Russia, China and other authoritarian regimes have used weaknesses in campaign finance and financial reporting laws to launch attacks on the political processes in the United States and elsewhere," Bill Theobald w [...]
JUST RELEASED: COVERT FOREIGN MONEY: FINANCIAL LOOPHOLES EXPLOITED BY AUTHORITARIANS TO FUND POLITICAL INTERFERENCE IN DEMOCRACIES Comprehensive new report by the Alliance for Securing Democracy identifies legal loopholes exposing U.S. elections to [...]
ASD Fellow for Malign Finance Josh Rudolph gives readers a short introduction to his recently released paper Covert Foreign Money: Financial Loopholes Exploited by Authoritarians to Fund Political Interference in Democracies, co-authored with Resear [...]
Foreign Policy's Amy McKinnon discusses the major points of ASD's new report, Covert Foreign Money: Financial Loopholes Exploited by Authoritarians to Fund Political Interference in Democracies. [...]
Executive Summary In addition to more widely studied tools like cyberattacks and disinformation, authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China have spent more than $300 million interfering in democratic processes more than 100 times spanning 33 [...]
This article was originally published as a GMF Transatlantic Take on July 31, 2020. After the United Kingdom’s parliament released its recent report on Russian interference in British democracy, front-page headlines howled that it damns the governme [...]
This article was originally published as a GMF Transatlantic Take on July 23, 2020. With mounting evidence that Russia regularly interferes in British democracy while the U.K. government “actively avoids” investigating, the country needs a proven pl [...]
The Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Authoritarian Interference Tracker maps and catalogs over 400 instances of Russian state-sponsored efforts to undermine democracy in over 40 countries. The Tracker documents five tools authoritarian regimes use [...]
Walking around China, the ubiquity of German cars on Chinese streets is astounding. Audi and Mercedes are everywhere in affluent cities; Volkswagens take their place in smaller municipalities. This anecdotal observation is reflected in the spectacul [...]
The European Commission "should act fast to capitalize on the political momentum toward creating a central AML [anti-money laundering] supervisory authority," Senior Fellow Josh Kirschenbaum writes with Nicolas Veron in PIIE. Kirschenbaum and Veron [...]
There is an emerging recognition in Western capitals that Russian strategic economic coercion and malign financial activity threaten to undermine the rule of law, weaken democracy, and meaningfully affect American and European politics. This underst [...]
The joint position paper published by the finance ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands and Spain on November 8 is likely to pave the way for strong European Union legislation, ASD's Josh Kirschenbaum writes with Nicolas Veron [...]
Transatlantic sanctions from the United States and Europe put real pressure on Russia to curb its aggression. American political leaders should urge Europe to refrain from lifting economic sanctions on Russia at this point in time and should signal [...]
Success in countering illicit financial activity will entail a change in mentality, better information sharing, and closer coordination within governments and across borders, Senior Fellow Joshua Kirschenbaum asserted in a brief for Frivarld, the St [...]
Fellow for Malign Finance Josh Rudolph discussed the issue of party financing from foreign resources on The Center for International Enterprise's podcast, Democracy that Delivers. [...]
It is now abundantly clear that covert foreign money gets weaponized against our democracy, Fellow on Malign Finance Josh Rudolph said on a Hudson Institute panel titled "Securing America's Financial Borders." [...]
ASD Fellow for Malign Finance Josh Rudolph writes in Just Security about the need for a holistic national security approach to campaign finance enforcement, in light of the recent arrest of two businessmen charged with funneling foreign donations to [...]