There’s no way to know what a State Department official might believe meets the definitions of “political support,” support “in any way,” the “Kremlin’s sham referenda,” or any of a half-dozen phrases in that passage. This is why the negative precedent of government watch lists after the PATRIOT Act was important. By making lists, officials can seriously impacting your life without notice or right of appeal. Even if courts later strike down the activity, it may take nearly 20 years to get there, and that’s assuming a) the state discloses enough to make a court challenge possible and b) they abide by any judicial rulings.
From Google and Twitter to the Departments of Justice and State, we’ve become a blacklisting society, and it’s beginning to look like the excesses of the Bush years were just a warmup. …
The State Department boasted about Putin’s election as both legitimate and the fruit of a long, U.S.-aided effort to build democratic infrastructure in Russia. They described an event heralding a pluralistic future. I leave it to the reader to decide if that constitutes “support in any way.”
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