Mueller’s indictment of Russian troll farm members confirms monetization of speech in wake

of Citizens United vs. FEC

2/17/18

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom protection of speech, or of the press; or the right of
the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If you thought the ‘Trump-Russia collusion’ advertising bonanza for news and journalistic
concerns was diversionary from real issues, you might have fallen into my camp of believing in
designs to obfuscate foreign policy from the attention of American citizens, or you might have
embraced the hypothesis that real collusion was Sino-based and the Executive Office was
collectively breathing sighs-of-relief that the scam was keeping prying eyes away from the
Donald’s shady Manchurian candidacy. But Robert Mueller’s indictment Friday
https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download confirms the de facto end-game of the
historic Citizens United vs. FEC decision https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/
that a special subset of speech that matters, i.e., that affecting elections of members of the U.S.
government, is protected, but no longer free. Certainly, a government of, by, and for the
moneyed interests recognizes that such speech is protected as proportional to expenditure,
and the defendants named in the indictment broke the rules.

It’s all about the fees, baby. Had the same defendants filed as foreign agents and paid their fees
https://www.fara.gov/farafee.html to the Department of Justice, their actions would have been
allowed, but are now subject to (hefty, to those of the masses not wealthy enough to purchase
political speech) enforcing sanctions (https://transition.fec.gov/law/feca/feca.pdf see page 51)
below the pocket change of the real controllers of political speech. That they hid their identities
and financing exposed them to additional charges of wire fraud and falsifying visas for their
travel.

As an American, you could have done exactly what these trolls did without consequence, but
although the First Amendment is written for citizens and non-citizens alike, the special
exclusion concerning elections has now come down to defining US versus THEM as a tariff to
election speech. The amusing part of the whole circus is that moneyed interests seem to
believe that social media users pay attention to such advertisements, in the same way they
maintain brown people commit voter fraud on behalf of non-GOP interests.

Calling the kettle black (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitter-

zunzuneo-stir-unrest , http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-us-intervention-foreign-elections-
20161213-story.html , https://www.rt.com/usa/364628-clinton-rigging-palestine-tape/ ) is not
the intention of this essay. A fine discussion followed Mr. Greenwald’s tweet
Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald

I also wonder what the world would look like if countries criminally charged all
foreigners who covertly & illegally interfered in their elections or political
 process. It's a good reminder that law - especially international law - is based on
power; "justice" is just the costume
1:42 PM - 16 Feb 2018
yesterday, https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/964615977806811136 on that topic. The
intention here is to point out that the result of the diversion is to codify that the DOJ will assist
in enforcing FEC (FARA requirements) and Department of State (VISA requirements) law to
ensure political speech, though still annoyingly available to citizens, will cost foreigners dearly.
How far down the slope have we slid toward charging Americans?