Pro Publica reports on the campaign contributions and lobbying efforts of businesses and organizations targets by States’ Attorneys General.

Attorneys general are now the object of aggressive pursuit by lobbyists and lawyers who use campaign contributions, personal appeals at lavish corporate-sponsored conferences and other means to push them to drop investigations, change policies, negotiate favorable settlements or pressure federal regulators, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

A robust industry of lobbyists and lawyers has blossomed as attorneys general have joined to conduct multistate investigations and pushed into areas as diverse as securities fraud and Internet crimes.

But unlike the lobbying rules covering other elected officials, there are few revolving-door restrictions or disclosure requirements governing state attorneys general, who serve as “the people’s lawyers” by protecting consumers and individual citizens.

A result is that the routine lobbying and deal-making occur largely out of view. But the extent of the cause and effect is laid bare in The Times’s review of more than 6,000 emails obtained through open records laws in more than two dozen states, interviews with dozens of participants in cases and attendance at several conferences where corporate representatives had easy access to attorneys general.

Often, the corporate representative is a former colleague. Four months after leaving office as chief deputy attorney general in Washington State, Brian T. Moran wrote to his replacement on behalf of a client, T-Mobile, which was pressing federal officials to prevent competitors from grabbing too much of the available wireless spectrum.

“As promised when we met the A.G. last week, I am attaching a draft letter for Bob to consider circulating to the other states,” he wrote late last year, referring to the attorney general, Bob Ferguson.

A short while later, Mr. Moran wrote again to his replacement, David Horn. “Dave: Anything you can tell me about that letter?” he said.

“Working on it sir,” came the answer. “Stay tuned.” By January, the letter was issued by the attorney general largely as drafted by the industry lawyers.

The exchange was not unusual. Emails obtained from more than 20 states reveal a level of lobbying by representatives of private interests that had been more typical with lawmakers than with attorneys general.

“The current and increasing level of the lobbying of attorneys general creates, at the minimum, the appearance of undue influence, and is therefore unseemly,” said James E. Tierney, a former attorney general of Maine, who now runs a program at Columbia University that studies state attorneys general. “It is undermining the credibility of the office of attorney general.”

Zephyr Teachout writes: More than 200 years ago, we included in our Constitution a provision that forbids federal officers from accepting a gift of any kind whatever from foreign interests without first getting permission from Congress (Article I, Section 9, the so-called Emoluments Clause). We borrowed the provision from the Netherlands, where it was ridiculed for being overly fussy about corruption. But we put it in both our Constitution and in that document’s forerunner, the Articles of Confederation, as a defense against emulating the corrupt culture of Europe.

The unlikely source of the provision was a snuff box. A few years before the constitutional convention, the King of France gave Benjamin Franklin a diamond encrusted snuff box after his diplomatic tour. Franklin did not appear to offer anything in return, but the gift nonetheless led to concerns that Franklin might be quietly corrupted by French interests—perhaps even without his knowing it.

The Americans, rigidly rejecting European custom, believed that acceptance of a luxurious gift by someone in power was itself a threat. Perhaps Franklin would be more generous toward French commercial interests simply by the operation of normal human sympathies, which to tend to be more charitable toward those who give us gifts. The framers tried to put a check on those sympathies, or at least put a block in the relationship, by requiring that Congress approve any gifts to federal officials.

Ironically, at the constitutional convention, Franklin was among the most outspoken in favor of anti-corruption provisions. His own lifelong experience with governments around the world had made him wary of the many ways in which officials could be tempted. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and Franklin weren’t wrong to be concerned about foreign powers attempting to use money to buy influence and favorable treatment.

According to The New York Times, Bill Clinton received a $500,000 personal payment from a Russian bank as payment for a speech in 2010. (In some cases, Bill Clinton directs his speaking fees to the Clinton Foundation, though there’s no evidence that happened in this case.) This payment happened around the same time that Hillary Clinton’s State Department was participating in the decision-making process on the legitimacy of Russian takeover of American uranium interests (the decision was made by an inter-agency body on which State was represented, but was chaired by Treasury). Many people have raised concerns that this fee, like Benjamin Franklin’s snuff box, might have swayed Bill Clinton’s—and Hillary’s—general thinking toward Russian interests at the time.

In effect, the troubling morality of Citizens United has become the official morality of Clinton’s defenders.  Over the past several years, Bill Clinton has been given millions of dollars for foreign and domestic speeches, with the greatest number of sponsors coming from the financial industry. At the same time, he solicited and received millions of dollars from foreign and domestic interests, including. Many of the donors and sponsors had interests that were affected by State Department policies, and all of the donors, past and current, have interests that would be affected by a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Hillary Clinton has not addressed the issue publicly, but some of her defenders have argued that without a smoking gun, or evidence of quid pro quo, there’s nothing to be concerned about.

As the framers knew, we don’t need that in order to be concerned.

Here is Teachout’s artcile on Anti-corruption in the US constitution.  Anti Corruption

Teachout recently ran for Governor of New York State.

Robert Hackett writes:  A report out of Arlington, Va.-based cyber security firm Lookingglass reveals a cyber campaign, allegedly Russian, waged against Ukrainian targets, such as the government, law enforcement, and military. The purpose of the state-sponsored espionage has apparently been to gather intelligence on its adversary, bolstering Russian war efforts.

The researchers dubbed the campaign “Operation Armageddon”. “For the most part the technologies were not advanced,” says Jason Lewis, chief collection and intelligence office at Lookingglass. “It’s not super sophisticated, but it’s certainly persistent.”

Lookingglass researchers worked with neither Ukraine nor Russia in its investigation, sourcing its materials rather from proprietary methods and through sites like VirusTotal, a public database where people can upload and scan files for known viruses.

Often, the researchers found, the hackers stole documents relevant to the outside conflict from victims’ machines, and then used those files to compromise future targets.

Once Ukraine’s interim President announced the start of an “anti-terrorist operation” against pro-Russian separatists in mid-April 2014, the conflict’s cyber activities significantly increased. From this point onwards, waves of cyber attacks from the Russians directly correlated with the timing of military events and were geared towards gathering intelligence to empower themselves on the physical battlefield – a digital method of espionage in its truest of forms.

The Lookingglass researchers, convinced that Russia is the culprit, agree with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB, descendant of the KGB) is to blame. (SBU, too, has called out FSB as being responsible for recent phishing attacks.) “We’re highly confident that the claims the SBU made are accurate,” Lewis says. “We didn’t find any evidence to the contrary to dispute those claims.”

That nation states are using cyber attacks to achieve geopolitical ends should come as no surprise.

Last year, CrowdStrike associated Chinese cyber espionage campaigns with China’s movement into disputed territory in the South Pacific as well as with an ISIS-led takeover of an Iraqi oil refinery. The security firm FireEye FEYE -1.07% found state actors using attack methods similar to those outlined above to target rebel forces during conflict in Syria. The security firm Cylance recently implicated Iran as having probed critical U.S. energy infrastructure, just prior to nuclear negotiations. And then, of course, there are the claims about Sony Pictures Entertainment and North Korea.

Espionage and cyber attacks can give countries that engage in the practice an upper hand in international affairs. “Nation states need to be able to asses how seriously people will take their threats and what they’ll do as result of a threat,” says Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at the security firm CrowdStrike, presenting a rationale for digital incursions. “It puts them in a better position to make a credible threat if they know what the response is going to be.”

Indeed, recent reports suggest that Russian spies have penetrated deep inside Ukraine’s intelligence apparatus.

A scholar based in China writes:  Since the start of its post-Mao reforms in the late 1970s, the communist regime in China has repeatedly defied predictions of its impending demise. The key to its success lies in what one might call “authoritarian adaptation”—the use of policy reforms to substitute for fundamental institutional change. Under Deng Xiaoping, this meant reforming agriculture and unleashing entrepreneurship. Under Jiang Zemin, it meant officially enshrining a market economy, reforming state-owned enterprises, and joining the World Trade Organization. Under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, it meant reforming social security. Many expect yet another round of sweeping reforms under Xi Jinping—but they may be disappointed.

The need for further reforms still exists, due to widespread corruption, rising inequality, slowing growth, and environmental problems. But the era of authoritarian adaptation is reaching its end, because there is not much potential for further evolution within China’s current authoritarian framework. A self-strengthening equilibrium of stagnation is being formed, which will be hard to break without some major economic, social, or international shock.

One reason for the loss of steam is that most easy reforms have already been launched. Revamping agriculture, encouraging entrepreneurship, promoting trade, tweaking social security—all these have created new benefits and beneficiaries while imposing few costs on established interests. What is left are the harder changes, such as removing state monop­olies in critical sectors of the economy, privatizing land, giving the National People’s Congress power over fiscal issues, and establishing an independent court system. Moving forward with these could begin to threaten the hold of the Chinese Communist Party on power, something that the regime is unwilling to tolerate.

Another reason for the loss of steam is the formation of an increasingly strong antireform bloc. Few want to reverse the reforms that have already taken place, since these have grown the pie dramatically. But many in the bureaucracy and the elite more generally would be happy with the perpetuation of the status quo, because partial reform is the best friend of crony capitalism.