Many Republicans were stunned when Vice President Harris’ campaign raised $1 billion in an incredibly short time. There are now indications that a significant portion of this money may come from illegal sources.

So the next ad you see for Ms. Harris may have been bought with Iranian, Chinese or drug cartel money. As Jean Salomon reported in Just the News, Democratic fundraiser ActBlue has been subpoenaed to inform Congress of fundraising activity that the U.S. Department of the Treasury has called suspicious.

According to Mr. Solomon, who has been investigating the system for weeks: “The dramatic developments were communicated to House members and ActBlue itself in a series of memos this week obtained by Just the News that reaffirmed that lawmakers feared foreign adversaries like China, Iran. , Venezuela and Russia could funnel illicit foreign money into Democratic coffers using the names of unsuspecting American donors.

A Wisconsin Republican professional, Mark Block, reported that 385 donations were made in his name through ActBlue. He said 35 of those donations were to the Harris campaign. As a Republican activist, he has never made a single donation through ActBlue. It may be a case of identity theft, and Mr. Block is suing ActBlue under Wisconsin’s anti-racketeering laws.

The Democrats’ quest for foreign capital is not something new. During President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, the so-called “Chinagate” scandal revealed that Chinese and Indonesian business owners had donated millions of dollars to the Democratic National Committee using false names.

I was Speaker of the House at the time. With my support, MP Dan Burton and his chief investigator, Dave Bossie, tracked illegal donors to Hong Kong. Their investigation led to the conviction of dozens of people for violating federal campaign finance laws and the imprisonment of several of them.

Four years later, Vice President Gore held a fundraiser at the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple. He raised $166,750, including $55,000 from monks and nuns who had taken their vows of poverty (they were allegedly illegally reimbursed by the temple). Ultimately, a Senate investigation revealed that the couple organizing the event had close ties to Chinese communist intelligence services.

The Clinton-Gore foreign money violations occurred in a pre-Internet era. They required heavy and slow use of paper. It is now possible to hide large donations by turning them into a huge amount of small donations. This is a technique called “surfing”.

According to the New York Post Miranda Devinemoney laundering experts working for the House Administration Committee and its chairman, Congressman Bryan Steil, “analyzed more than 200 million Federal Election Commission records over the past 14 years to identify suspicious patterns such as hundreds of $2.50 donations from the same person.”

The defendant in Mr. Block’s lawsuit is “John Doe,” an unidentified donor. The credit card used for donations is linked to an address in Santa Monica, California.

According to Mr. Block’s lawsuit: “By making these fraudulent donations, John Doe participated in the operation of ActBlue’s particular business model: providing small campaign contributions to Democratic campaigns and organizations to advance left-wing policies… Defendant John Doe used (Block’s lawsuit) personally identifying information to benefit ActBlue campaigns and circumvent federal requirements prohibiting the use of another person’s name to make political contributions.

As Ms. Devine reported, Mr. Steil submitted his findings about “potential criminal activity” to the Republican attorneys general of Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Texas and Virginia in September.

It should come as no surprise to us that Iran, China, Russia, and South and Central American transnational crime syndicates are willing to exploit weaknesses in the U.S. political fundraising system.

Everyone has a strong stake in a Harris presidency. They know that Ms. Harris would be much softer and easier to get around than President Trump.

The Roman Republic began to collapse when foreign kings learned that it was cheaper and safer to bribe senators than to fight the Roman army. The scale of wealth and power within the American system presents a tremendous danger of civic decadence and corruption, the same type that destroyed the Roman Republic and paved the way for the Roman Empire.

We need to rethink our campaign contribution system to make everything transparent. No foreigner should be able to buy influence in America by buying elected officials.

ActBlue has a duty to every American to open their accounts and help us uncover which donations were fraudulent. The Harris campaign and other campaigns would then be required to refund the illegal donations. This is potentially a real crisis of the American system of self-government.