[elgabogringo]

Actually, I didn't say financial influence, I said foreign influence and the article refers back to foreign influences in multiple places, just one example below:

If foreign governments learn that they can influence our elections with impunity, this opens the door for future manipulations, both document thefts and dumps like this one that we see and more subtle manipulations that we don't see.

I'm not derailing a thread if I'm reminding the readers that much of the foreign influence we are threatened by comes about through the complicity / corruption of domestic political actors.

[elgabogringo]

Note that it's also very relevant to comment I replied to. Not being argumentative (or don't mean to be.) I'll admit when I'm wrong, but I feel this comment was relevant to the original comment in the thread and article and these are my reasons why.