And in your analogy, all hypothetical of course, the VC here is located in Moscow?

Update: Am I really being down-voted for suggesting what everyone already knows? Seriously?

It's generally a bad idea to complain about down-votes. Try to shrug and argue the points, not people's choices for how to respond to the points.

Taking my own advice, regardless of what you or anybody may think of the connection between Russian money, Russian politics, and Mr. Trump, surely we can find a number of wealthy Americans who are interested in winding down Federal oversight.

I'd start with the high-fructose corn syrup people, the private university rip-off people, and the fossil fuel people. If there are also Russian interests, surely they are not "acting alone."

> surely we can find a number of wealthy Americans who are interested in winding down Federal oversight.

Or non-wealthy Americans interested in winding down Federal over-reach. Really, in a federal republic aren't there quite a lot of things which can safely be left to the several states? Is it necessary to make everything an item for federal concern?

Most things already are. But there are many things that do need to be a federal concern, because a state does not exist in a vacuum, nor is it a (metaphorical) island. Things like the environment and pollution, for instance, need to have a federal component. One state may decide to relax environmental protections so that they can encourage factories and jobs. However, that pollution does not limit itself to the people that decided it. People outside that area, in other states that do have environmental regulations, will also be affected.

> But there are many things that do need to be a federal concern

I completely agree! Most of them are already explicitly listed as federal concerns, in the Constitution; we should amend it to include environmental concerns for the exact reason you note.

But I see no reason why e.g. education should be a federal concern. Let the states do as they will.

Because there need to be national standards for education. The citizens of a state do not exist in a vacuum, and being taught Creationism instead of actual science is going to do great harm to those kids ability to get jobs, which is going to have an impact on many sectors of the economy.

> Really, in a federal republic aren't there quite a lot of things which can safely be left to the several states?

Well, you hope so, otherwise a federal republic is a good idea. OTOH, simply because you have a federal government (or even that it was a good idea a century or two ago) doesn't mean that a federal republic is a good idea, and even if a federal republic is a good idea and there are quite a lot of things that make most sense at the state level, well, that doesn't mean that every particular thing belongs there.

Then they should do away with the stupid downvotes. You can't argue points with people who don't actually say anything.

This is 100% Driven by Americans. See “Freedom Caucus.”

If we're going to entertain the analogy further, Freedom Caucus is an association of funding targets for "VCs" (PACs and super-PACs) in which Russian investors/state agents are possibly LPs (see: reports of Russian money in the NRA).

LPs typically don't have such a direct influence on the operations of the investments, although certain actual LP arrangements have in recent years.

Of course, the nature of political contributions and influence seems to be vastly more complicated compared to VC.

The dismantling of the Fed Gov is decades in the making. While there may be recent foreign influence on the margins, the Kochs, Adelson, Mercer, and the rest of the GOP donor class are the originators of this GOP agenda.

Nothing is ever 100%

No one knows that. You're down-voted for buying into an ineffective political tactic- Dems are attacking trump as being a product of Russia because 1) It's easier than attacking him on policy, and 2) There are many policies that are disturbing to the majority of voters, but have bipartisan support in the legislature.

So by 'no one', you mean the Office of US National Intelligence (who are made up of career employees), right? Here is their full report:

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

From the report:

"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.

Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or 'trolls.'"

I didn't read the report, but your quote just says they tried.

It doesn't say anything on if they actually succeeded.

Find a quote that says they actually succeeded in having influence over Trump, and maybe that would be a valid argument.

Antiviral doesn't claim anything one way or the other about an attempt to influence Trump; just the election.

There’s a mountain of circumstantial evidence (most recently, the Trump administration’s flat refusal to implement the Russian sanctions https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/us/politics/trump-russia-... which had passed both houses of Congress almost unanimously, and were signed by Trump because they realized a veto would be overridden). If you want you can peruse a very extensive timeline, http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-russia-timeline/ (to get much out of this you need to actually read the linked stories, which takes considerable time and effort; this is a complex case and public knowledge dribbles out in bits and pieces, and the purpose of a timeline like this is to collect them not to provide high-level analysis. I’m not sure if there is a concise coherent summary anywhere.)

The special counsel is presumably constructing a more fleshed out case looking at proving a direct quid pro quo, using witness testimony, financial records, etc. All of that investigation is currently secret however.

> most recently, the Trump administration’s flat refusal to implement the Russian sanctions

And not that long ago he put more sanctions on them than was requested by Obama. So you can not read anything into that.

I skimmed your timeline. It's pretty much junk. You can make a timeline like for basically anyone. If you have enough public activity some of it is going to line up.

> All of that investigation is currently secret however.

That's not an excuse for you to declare case over. So far every time people claim to have some evidence or other, it's all been nothing.

Trump says a lot of stupid things, but I've never found anything that makes him beholden to the Russians. And in fact, even if they did help him, Trump, of all people, would feel perfectly free to completely not care.

He's already well known for ignoring political norms. Ignoring the norm of helping people who help you would be completely typical for him.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument that the Russians don’t have compromising material used for blackmail (something for which we have circumstantial but not direct public evidence), Trump has spent 20 years making his living from Russian money laundering. Why do you think he would “completely not care”?

Who said the “case was over”? It’s clearly an ongoing investigation, which will hopefully be allowed to proceed to its conclusion despite the president’s ham-handed efforts to obstruct it.

Why do you think Trump’s campaign was so filled with people traveling back and forth to Russia, having secret meetings with Russian intelligence assets, trying to set up secure communications channels directly to the Russian government, and so on? Why do you think they have spent so much effort on publicly lying about those meetings and communications, and so much effort on shutting down the investigation about it?

>And not that long ago he put more sanctions on them than was requested by Obama. So you can not read anything into that.

Are you referring to this? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-sanctions/trum...