What The Founders Understood about Foreign Influence and Corruption— and what They Missed

The framers of our Republic saw how a lot of things could go wrong with their designs, and they built in safeguards and course corrections to help us get back on track when power does what power always does.

They knew, for example, that foreign nations would be eager to influence our politics. And at the time, foreign nations were all around us: the British in Canada, the French in Louisiana, the Spanish in Florida and Mexico, and just about everyone in the Caribbean. The United States was geographically huge and resource-rich. But we were also poor, deeply in debt, industrially weak, and militarily non-existent —just the sort of junior nation that the great powers of the 18th century loved to try to turn into client states.

The Founders recognized foreign interference in our electoral processes. Alexander Hamilton addresses this directly in the 68th Federalist. Perhaps the worst threat the he could imagine to the Republic was a chief executive that had been compromised by a foreign power:

Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one…