A small but growing majority of Americans are concerned that Russia has interfered with our national elections. While much has been made about hacking, and Russian intelligence service involvement, there are other more obvious ways that Vladimir Putin may have cooked our elections. Republicans cannot, will not look into the possibility of Foreign Election influence, because doing so threatens to unmask the extent to which secret money has, and will continue to help get them elected.
The Republican party will do anything to impose their unpopular views on the rest of us Americans. They understand that they are a minority of the population, but have convinced themselves that the rightness of their cause is more important than the niceties of democracy. They seized upon obscure language in the tax code to allow a very few people to make secret donations to promote their agenda and elect Republicans. They know that funds collected this way are not supposed to be used in campaigns, but they also know that by design the Federal Elections Commission will not look into allegations of violations see https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/opinion/dysfunction-and-deadlock-at-the-federal-election-commission.html?_r=0 .
Campaigns are not supposed to accept money from Foreign Governments or individuals. However, Republican operatives have no scruples about this either. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/18/foreign-money-campaign-finance-lobbying_n_897189.html . Secret money is routed through American based subsidiaries or via lobbying shops to candidates and elected officials as well (I’m looking at you Orrin Hatch.) Trump campaign operative Paul Manafort is just such a lobbyist. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communications-trump.html .
The problem for Republicans is that they cannot allow people to start turning over rocks. In 2016 alleged non-profit charitable organizations spent $ 183.67 million dollars on the Federal Election. See https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/nonprof_summ.php . Because of the deliberately opaque names and organization charts of these so called charities, identifying which ones may have had foreign donors would require a systematic review and investigation of all such charities. The Republican machine has been comfortable with flouting the law in this area because they could count on the impotence of the FEC. Allowing a real investigation including subpoena power once started would be very difficult to control.
I believe the Russian Government did attempt to influence our elections. We know they used cyber-espionage to do this. I suspect they also used our laughably inadequate election finance laws as well. Republican partisans are well aware of how they have been using and abusing this body of law. In my opinion, they cannot allow an independent investigation into these allegations without risk of unearthing their own election malfeasance.