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Trump supporters stand on the U.S. Capitol Police armored vehicle as others take over the steps of the Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, as the Congress works to certify the electoral college votes.

Bill Clark | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

Corporate money has flooded U.S. elections ever since 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that business donations amounted to protected free speech under the First Amendment.

But the steady stream of cash slowed this week, when several businesses announced they would suspend donations from their political action committees after the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6. The businesses spanned industries, from Facebook to JPMorgan Chase to Walmart.

The promises were relatively narrow and did not suggest a permanent retreat from election spending. Some businesses promised only to cut spending from politicians who objected to confirming President-elect Joe Biden's victory, while others said they would reassess all PAC contributions.

But as employees, consumers and shareholders step up pressure on businesses to address their social impact, the announcements represented a significant departure from the status quo.

If the trend sticks, businesses may look to a handful of companies to learn how to gain influence in government without PAC spending.

In the tech sector, Apple and IBM have long resisted creating their own PACs, yet their presence is felt strongly in Washington. CEOs from both companies have sat on President Donald Trump's American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, and Apple's Tim Cook has cultivated a relationship with Trump that may have helped it avoid getting caught in the crossfire of Trump's tariff fight with China.

"We've never had a PAC at IBM and I've never felt that it diminished our effectiveness or our voice in any way," Christopher Padilla, IBM's VP of government and regulatory affairs, told CNBC in an interview. "In fact, it's times like this that I'm actually glad we don't have a PAC because it's kind of easy just to say, 'I'm going to stop my PAC giving either to everybody or to some people.' It's a little harder to say what are the deeper issues that are causing some of these problems and can we do anything about it as companies?"

IBM revealed on Friday several particular areas where it plans to focus its advocacy this year. Broadly, the policies center around ensuring a stable federal government and that political partisanship doesn't interfere with public servants' jobs. This includes things like strengthening the Hatch Act, which is meant to prevent public officials from using their posts for partisan activities, and legislating clear rules about how a presidential transition should be performed.

Padilla talked with CNBC on Thursday to share why IBM has decided to take a stand on such issues and how it has made its voice heard in Washington without PAC contributions.

PACs aren't the only way companies can spend money to influence politicians. In the third quarter of 2020, for example, Apple spent nearly $1.6 million and IBM $650,000 in lobbying spending, according to public disclosures.

Padilla said much of the money IBM puts toward policy issues is used to connect with local representatives. Pre-pandemic, this included flying many of them into Washington to meet directly with lawmakers.

"I sit in those meetings and the kinds of relationships the local plant manager from New York or Texas has with their elected official, you can't buy that with hundreds of PAC checks," Padilla said.

IBM has had a seat at the table for key policy proposals, including around reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a contentious statute that protects online platforms from being held liable for users' messages on their platforms. IBM successfully advocated for SESTA-FOSTA, the package that removed Section 230 protection for platforms that hosted solicitations of sex trafficking.

More recently, it has urged lawmakers go even further, making liability protection dependent on platforms demonstrating a standard of "reasonable care" to remove illegal behavior from their sites. IBM has praised the bipartisan PACT Act, for example, which would require platforms to remove content that a court finds to be illegal within 24 hours. The company is firm, however, that Section 230 should not be repealed and the "Good Samaritan" provision that allows companies to moderate their platforms should be left intact.

Tech platforms like Facebook have also advocated for SESTA-FOSTA as well as other modest reforms to Section 230. But IBM does not have as much potential direct exposure to liability as consumer-facing platforms would if the statute were more significantly altered.

President Donald Trump speaks, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence (L) and IBM CEO Virginia Marie 'Ginni' Rometty (R) during a roundtable discussion on vocational training with United States and German business leaders lead in the Cabinet Room of the White House on March 17, 2017 in Washington, DC.

Getty Images

In some ways, shying away from election spending has been helpful to IBM's efforts, especially during a time of deep political division. Padilla described IBM as "fiercely nonpartisan," even during the intense 2016 election where many prominent tech executives voiced support for then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Padilla said IBM was able to quickly reach out to the Trump administration to lay out areas of overlapping interests.

In addition to serving on Trump's workforce policy panel, former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty previously served on former President Barack Obama's export council.

"I remember going with her in September 2016 for a meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office to talk about trade and we were back in the West Wing less than six months later for her to have a meeting with President Trump," Padilla said.

Without PAC donations or other partisan moves, he said, "When the pendulum inevitably swings, you can be well-positioned to advocate your interests."

Without a PAC, Padilla said it would have been easy to have "washed our hands and said we don't have anything to do here" to address the Capitol riot. But, he said, that approach "certainly wouldn't have addressed the questions we've gotten from our own employees about what can we do to try to address some of these issues."

Employee activism has gained steam over the past few years, particularly at tech companies built on the values of an open internet and innovation. At places like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, internal movements have forced the companies to takes stances or action on issues like climate change, sexual harassment and work with the military.

Over the past summer during mass protests for racial justice and police reform, employees, consumers and shareholders looked to brands to take a stance on those issues. Many companies issued statements, pledged money to nonprofits and some, like IBM, backed policies like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

Padilla said he has noticed "a sea change" in terms of how employees, shareholders and local communities expect the company to get involved in issues outside of its direct business during his nearly 12 years at IBM.

"What we're seeing more and more is companies are having to get involved in issues that maybe go a little bit outside their narrow lanes because their employees and their shareholders are expecting them to do so," Padilla said."This is what companies do now."

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How IBM influences policy without spending big money on election campaigns - CNBC

President-elect Joe Biden is expected to name Gary Gensler, a former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to Reuters.

Gensler is a long-time Washington policymaker. He was a top Treasury official during the Clinton administration, and, while leading the CFTC, he helped craft Dodd-Frank, the federal government's response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Gary Gensler

Source: CFTC

"He's a smart and tough regulator who knows how to get things done," Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, told The Wall Street Journal.

Analysts praise Gensler's tenure at the CFTC, the federal government's main derivatives regulator. He was there for five years immediately following the financial crisis.

"He was terrifically effective," Roper said.

Gensler is credited with creating a framework for regulating the over-the-counter swaps market and for going after banks whose manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) ultimately encouraged officials to consider replacing it.

After leaving the CFTC, the former Goldman Sachs banker joined Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign as its CFO. Currently, he's an adjunct instructor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

At the SEC, analysts expect Gensler to roll back many of the outgoing administration's regulatory efforts, including eased rules to encourage more companies to go public and to allow companies to pay gig workers partially in equity stakes.

He's also expected to seek tougher disclosure rules, tighten firewalls between companies and their auditors, and press companies to disclose their environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance.

"In stark contrast to the prior [SEC] chairman, Gary will actually look out for Mr. and Mrs. 401(k) and Main Street investors," Better Markets CEO Dennis Kelleher said in an Axios report. "Gary is the right choice to lead the SEC in a new direction."

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Former Clinton CFO, CFTC head Gary Gensler expected to be named SEC chief - CFO Dive

One of Georgias 16 presidential electors cast her Electoral College vote for Joe Biden but says, if she had it her way, the United States would do away with theconstitutional election process altogethera radical and dangerousposition.

I support abolishing the Electoral College, former Atlanta City Council President Cathy Woolardsaidduring a recent interview. I think all too often the popular vote has been overturned by the Electoral College and that doesnt seem right to me.

It may not seem right to Ms. Woolard, but the Electoral College purposefully forces would-be presidents tobuild nationwide coalitions, courting diverse voters across the country. Itshould remain in place. Otherwise, politicians would ignore the needs of people inflyover countryand focuseven moreonbig cities andthe coasts.

Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clintonwas another elector who, like Ms. Woolard,called for eliminatingthe Electoral Collegeeven as she cast one of New Yorks electoral votesfor Democrat President-elect Joe Biden.

I believe we should abolish the Electoral College and select our president by the winner of the popular vote, same as every other office, she said in atweet. But while it still exists, I was proud to cast my vote in New York for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Clinton is missing the fact that the presidency is not like other offices. Most major democratic nations use a two-step process (usually a parliamentary system) to elect their top executive. Our Electoral College, like those other systems, balancesthe interests of everyone acrossadiverse country while limitingthe power of big-cityelites.

Our system also limits the power of Washington, D.C.As Thomas S. Kidd,historyprofessor at Baylor University,says, 2020 has shown that the states still possess powerful checks on national executive power. Thats a good thing, and we should be exceedingly cautious about cutting the states out of the process of electing the president (i.e. the Electoral College).

Complaints about the Electoral Collegeoftenstem from Clintonslossin 2016. At various times, Clinton hasblamedformer FBI Director James Comey, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), President Barack Obama,Russiaand, of course, the Electoral Collegefor her loss.

Really it wasClintonsowndecisionsthat cost her the presidency, and the Electoral College worked just right. By design, the Electoral College rewards candidates who do the hard work of winning over Americans in many states, not just winning huge margins in a few states or giant cities. The American Founders believed the president should be a national candidate, not a regional one.

In 1888, Grover Clevelandwon the popular vote but was blown out in the Electoral College because his support was concentrated in the South; he won huge margins there but lost almost everywhere else. Similarly, Clinton ran up huge margins in coastal states while failing to connect with middle America.

Clinton dismissed struggling voters asdeplorablesand lost their votes as a consequence. Marc Thiessen of The Washington Postargues,Clinton still cant seem to tell the difference between a white nationalist and working-class voters who are upset because their family incomes are stagnant or falling, they feel shut out of the labor force, and their communities are mired in substance abuse and despair. Theseforgotten Americanshad legitimate grievances that Democrats ignored.

The Clinton campaign also squandereditsmonetary advantageby failing to invest enough instates like Michigan and Pennsylvania.Accordingto one liberal activist, the candidates team was,very surgical and corporate. Their thing was,We dont have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is.

Joe Biden corrected Clintons errors,cultivating a working man persona andinvesting heavilyin turning out the vote inkeystates.He received the Democratic nominationin partbecause primary votersbelievedhe wouldappeal to those forgotten Americans who Clinton had ignored and demeaned.

In both 2016 and 2020, the Electoral College worked as intended. Serious presidential candidates were forced to build diverse coalitions rather than relying on one region or demographic group. For close to 250 years, the Electoral College has fostered a healthy and vibrant electoral system, and we shouldnt throw that away because Hillary Clinton mismanaged her campaign.

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Opinion: What's the True Agenda Behind the Movement to Abolish the Electoral College? - Prescott eNews

West Vancouver billionaire Frank Giustra has been given the go-ahead to sue Twitter in a B.C. courtroom over the social media giant's publication of a series of tweets tying him to baseless conspiracy theories involving pedophile rings and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In a ruling released Thursday, Justice Elliott Myers found that Giustra's history and presence in British Columbia, combined with the possibility the tweets may have been seen by as many as 500,000 B.C. Twitter users, meant a B.C. court should have jurisdiction over the case.

It's a victory not only for Giustra whose philanthropic activities have earned him membership in both the Orders of Canada and B.C. but for Canadian plaintiffs trying to hold U.S.-based internet platforms responsible forborder-crossing content.

In a statement, Giustra said he was looking forward to pursuing the case in the province where he built his reputation as the founder of Lionsgate Entertainment.

"I hope this lawsuit will help raise public awareness of the real harm to society if social media platforms are not held responsible for the content posted and published on their sites," Giustra said.

"I believe that words do matter, and recent events have demonstrated that hate speech can incite violence with deadly consequences."

Giustra filed the defamation lawsuit in April 2019, seeking an order to force Twitter to remove tweets he claimed painted him as "corrupt" and "criminal."

He claimed he was targeted by a group who vilified him "for political purposes" in relation to the 2016 U.S. election and his work in support of the Clinton Foundation.

The online attacks allegedly included death threats and links to "pizzagate" a "false, discredited and malicious conspiracy theory in which [Giustra] was labelled as a 'pedophile,'" the claim stated.

Twitter has not filed a response to Giustra's claim itself applying instead to have the case tossed because of jurisdiction.

The California-based company said it does not do business in B.C. and that Giustra was only relying on his B.C. roots to file the case in Canada because it would be a non-starter in the U.S., where the First Amendment protects free speech.

The company claimed he would have been mostly affected in the U.S.where he spends much of his time, owns extensive property and has substantial interests in the entertainment industry meaning B.C. is only tangentially connected to the matter.

In essence, Myers said, Twitter claimed it was only a platform for others to post comment, and couldn't be expected to face defamation cases every place people felt aggrieved.

The judge said the case presented some difficult if timely questions.

"This case illustrates the jurisdictional difficulties with internet defamation where the publication of the defamatory comments takes place in multiple countries where the plaintiff has a reputation to protect," Myers wrote.

"The presumption is that a defendant should be sued in only one jurisdiction for an alleged wrong, but that is not a simple goal to achieve fairly for internet defamation."

Myers found Giustra's connection to B.C. undeniable.

"There can be no dispute that Mr. Giustra has a significant reputation in British Columbia. He also has strong ties to the province," he wrote.

"The fact that he has a reputation in or connections to other jurisdictions does not detract from that."

The judge said Giustra had also done what he needed to do to showhis reputation in B.C. might have been affected.

"I do not agree with Twitter who argues that of all places in the world, the Plaintiff's reputation has not been harmed in B.C.," Myers wrote.

In its application, Twitter drew on a 2018 Supreme Court of Canada judgment in which a Canadian billionaire with substantial interests in Israel was denied his bid to sue an Israeli newspaper in Ontario over an article that appeared online.

In that case, the court ruled that Israel would be the more appropriate place to hold a trial because the billionaire was better known there, he hadn't limited his suit to damages suffered in Canada and most of the witnesses would also be in Israel.

But Myers found that many of the tweets referred to B.C. and went beyond the kind of business articles that were at the heart of the Supreme Court of Canada case.

"Here the tweets refer to Mr. Giustra's personal characteristics alleging, for example, pedophilia," Myers wrote.

Despite the lawsuit, Giustra maintains a Twitter account.

The court filings include a letter hewrote to Twitter chief executive officer Jack Dorsey in April 2018, asking him to make his case a priority.

"As Twitter's CEO, I ask that you now investigate the source of these past and ongoing attacks against me whether they are the result of individuals, a group, bots, or a combination of all three," Giustra wrote.

"I do not want to cancel my Twitter account that would be a victory of those who are turning this incredible communication tool into a conduit for slander and hate."

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B.C. billionaire given the green light to sue Twitter over 'Pizzagate' tweets - CBC.ca

President Trumps last days in office offer a final opportunity to declassify critical information on the Russia investigation that engulfed his lone term.

Voluminous public records including investigative reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Congress and the Justice Departments inspector general have established that Trump and his associates were targeted with a baseless Russian collusion allegation. The fraudulent claim originated with the Hillary Clinton campaign, was fueled by a torrent of false or deceptive intelligence leaks, and was improperly investigated by the FBI, potentially to the point of being criminal. Despite these disclosures, key questions remain about the origins and the spread of the conspiracy theory.

Before he leaves office on Jan. 20, Trump could use his declassification authority to help clear up some critical issues of the Russiagate saga.

A version of this piece initially appeared Jan. 10 at RealClearInvestigations.com

The FBI says it opened its Trump-Russia investigation on July 31, 2016 after learning of a potential offer of Russian assistance to junior Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos. It later emerged that the offer came from a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud, whom U.S. officials have suggested was acting as a Russian cutout.

Muellers team depicted Mifsud as having extensive contacts with Russia. Yet Mifsuds closest public ties had been to Western governments, politicians, and institutions, including the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence services. Despite Mifsuds central role in the investigation, the FBI conducted only one brief interview with him in February 2017. The Mueller team later claimed that Mifsud gave false statements to FBI agents yet, conspicuously, did not indict him for lying. The FBIs notes on the interview show that Mifsud denied having any advance knowledge of Russian hacking.

Why didnt the FBI grill Mifsud about his sources, methods and contacts? What other efforts, if any, were made to surveil him?

A highly placed Kremlin mole was the main source of the core claim in CIA Director John Brennans hastily produced 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help defeat Clinton and support Trump.

The ICAs claim was widely portrayed as the consensus view of U.S. spy agencies, but in reality it was the conclusion drawn by a small group of CIA analysts, closely managed by then-Director Brennan. Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations revealed that Brennan overruled two senior analysts who disagreed with it.

Multiple outlets have already outed the mole, Oleg Smolenkov, and the circumstances of his exit from Russia in June 2017. This supposed betrayer of the Kremlins secrets was found to be living under his own name in a Virginia suburb.

After the FBIs collusion probe got underway in July 2016, it purportedly did not rely on the Steele dossier, a series of opposition-research memos prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. In his testimony to Congress in July 2019, Mueller claimed that the dossier was outside my purview.

Yet the FBI did extensively rely on the Steele dossier, most egregiously to obtain a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

There may be more evidence, as suggested in recently declassified documents, that the Steele material played a bigger role in the Mueller investigation than previously known. Further declassification could shed additional light on whether Muellers disavowal of Steele aligns with the conduct of his investigators.

In June 2016, CrowdStrike, a private company, accused Russian government hackers of infiltrating the Democratic National Committees servers. This assessment was presented as direct evidence of Russian interference in the presidential election and was later endorsed by the FBI and Muellers team.

CrowdStrikes highly consequential allegation has been contradicted by subsequent disclosures. Like Steele, CrowdStrike was a Democratic Party contractor whose version of events dovetailed with the Clintons campaigns apparent desire to muddy Trump with Russia connections. In a stunning admission, U.S. prosecutors told a court in June 2019 that CrowdStrike had submitted reports of a forensic analysis of its servers to the government in draft, redacted form.

The Crowdstrike reports would indicate whether the FBI and Muellers team were on solid ground in asserting Russia hacked the DNC and stole its emails.

Given the importance of the hacking allegation, and if its evidence is non-classified, why shouldnt Trump direct the U.S. intelligence community to release all of it?

The January 2017 ICA assessed with high confidence that a Russian intelligence agency, the GRU, used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release the stolen DNC files. In its July 2018 indictment of GRU officers, the Mueller team also strongly suggested that Guccifer transferred the stolen DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

The special counsels final report, issued in March 2019, quietly acknowledged that it cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries an admission that it has no hard evidence that Guccifer 2.0 was WikiLeaks source. It does not identify who those intermediaries might have been. Also missing from Muellers account is the evidence used to identify Guccifer 2.0 as a Russian intelligence front.

The Russia investigation remains a bitterly partisan issue, but its worth remembering that in November 2016, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta called on the U.S. government to declassify information around Russias roles in the election and to make this data available to the public. His purposes were different, of course. Nonetheless, disclosing such information now would give Americans a fair understanding of an unprecedented investigation into a sitting president as well as the conduct of the intelligence officials who it carried out.

This article was adapted from RealClearInvestigations.

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Op-Ed: Its Trumps last chance to declassify these secrets of the Russia collusion dud - The Center Square