Introduction: The Network Is Part of the Story

Many of the most consequential political conflicts of the twenty-first century occur beyond the formal institutions in which citizens ordinarily expect politics to take place. They unfold through think tanks, foundations, universities, law firms, consulting shops, media organizations, advocacy groups, professional associations, and the networks linking former officials, funders, researchers, lawyers, and political operatives.

This does not imply that these institutions form a single conspiracy or receive instructions from a central command. Usually, they do not. The more useful proposition is both less dramatic and more important: political power is increasingly exercised through networks. These networks move four essential resources—people, money, ideas, and information—between private institutions and public office.

The constitutional architecture of the United States remains formally clear. Congress legislates, the executive exercises executive authority, courts adjudicate, states retain reserved powers, and political parties compete for office. Yet surrounding this structure is a large informal infrastructure through which policies are formulated, personnel are recruited, narratives are legitimized, and political capacity is accumulated. The central question is therefore not merely who holds office. It is also who has built the institutions through which ideas, personnel, resources, and information reach officeholders.

That framework helps clarify the controversy over a November 2025 video featuring six Democratic members of Congress with military or intelligence backgrounds. Critics—including President Donald Trump—described the lawmakers’ conduct as seditious. The lawmakers and their defenders maintained that they were restating a basic legal principle: service members must not obey unlawful orders. The video featured Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly and Representatives Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander, Chris Deluzio, and Chrissy Houlahan. All had prior military or intelligence experience.

The accusation of sedition should be analytically separated from the broader political question. Under the federal seditious-conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2384, the offense involves an agreement to use force against U.S. authority, oppose its authority by force, or use force to obstruct federal law. A contentious political statement, without evidence of such an agreement or force, does not automatically meet that standard. Legal experts cited by FactCheck.org similarly concluded that the video did not amount to sedition and instead invoked the established obligation to refuse unlawful orders.

Still, the episode raises a serious structural question: how do political networks develop the authority, personnel, legal arguments, communications capacity, and institutional reach needed to influence—or resist—the exercise of presidential power?

The Visible Event and the Infrastructure Behind It

The video was brief. The professional and institutional context surrounding it was not.

Slotkin’s former CIA and Defense Department experience, Kelly’s status as a retired Navy captain, and the military or intelligence backgrounds of the other participants gave their message special force with the communities they addressed. Political communication carries additional weight when the messenger belongs to the professional culture of the audience. A retired officer speaking to service members, or a former intelligence officer speaking to national-security personnel, is heard differently from a conventional partisan spokesperson.

Yet professional affinity must not be confused with institutional control. A former CIA officer is not the CIA. A retired military officer is not the Pentagon. Former officials may retain personal relationships, professional credibility, and technical knowledge, but those assets do not establish that their former agencies directed, coordinated, or endorsed their political activity.

This distinction is essential. Weak analysis treats any overlap in personnel, ideology, funding, or professional history as proof of covert command. Equally weak analysis assumes that networks are politically irrelevant unless someone can produce a written order from a central coordinator. In reality, influence often operates through shared assumptions, institutional incentives, reputational signals, career pathways, and common funding environments rather than explicit directives.

The relevant question is therefore not whether all actors are controlled by one institution. It is whether particular organizations and individuals possess the capacity to reinforce a common policy framework across multiple domains: research, media, campaigns, law, personnel recruitment, philanthropy, and government.

The Eight-Year Question

Critics of the 2025 video have argued that it represented a visible expression of a longer-running ecosystem involving former national-security officials, legal scholars, transition-planning groups, political organizations, philanthropic institutions, and Democratic personnel networks. Figures such as Rosa Brooks and organizations such as National Security Action and the Transition Integrity Project are sometimes presented as evidence of a sustained effort to constrain or delegitimize Donald Trump’s presidency.

Some components of that history are documented. The stronger conclusion—that these activities formed a single, centrally directed, eight-year campaign to remove, disable, or sideline Trump—requires a much higher evidentiary threshold.

A serious analysis should distinguish among four propositions. First, individuals may have shared concerns about Trump’s approach to executive power, elections, military authority, or democratic institutions. Second, organizations may have built policy and personnel capacity for Democratic national-security politics. Third, scenario exercises may have examined potential election and transition crises. Fourth, a coordinated operational campaign may have existed to use state institutions, the military, or intelligence agencies against a president.

The first three propositions can be evaluated through public records, organizational histories, reports, and participants’ own statements. The fourth requires evidence of coordination, command authority, operational planning, or institutional direction. Shared ideology, professional overlap, and common opposition to a political figure are not enough by themselves.

Networks can produce substantial political effects without functioning as conspiracies. They can align around a set of assumptions, recruit from the same professional pools, draw upon overlapping sources of funding, and validate each other’s arguments. The analyst’s task is to establish where documented institutional linkage ends and inference begins.

Personnel Pipelines and National Security Action

National Security Action emerged as a Democratic-aligned national-security organization during the Trump era and was co-founded by Ben Rhodes and Jake Sullivan. Sullivan’s public biography identifies him as a co-founder and co-chair of the organization’s advisory board before he later served as national security adviser from January 2021 through January 2025. Public accounts describe the organization as part of a broader effort by former Obama administration officials to develop Democratic national-security policy capacity.

That function is not unusual. Modern political parties require more than candidates. They need a durable ecosystem of defense and foreign-policy specialists, intelligence and homeland-security professionals, lawyers and legislative staff, communications advisers, researchers, campaign personnel, transition officials, donors, funders, and advocacy organizations.

The “revolving door” between government, campaigns, think tanks, universities, media, advocacy organizations, and private consulting is a longstanding feature of Washington. It supplies expertise and continuity, but it also blurs the practical boundary between public authority and private influence. Officials leave government with experience and networks; private institutions give them platforms and resources; subsequent administrations draw on that pool when staffing executive agencies.

That process is not inherently corrupt. It can improve competence and preserve institutional memory. But it can also create self-reinforcing professional ecosystems in which a limited set of assumptions becomes conventional wisdom, alternative perspectives receive less institutional support, and personnel circulate through the same ideological and organizational channels.

The Transition Integrity Project

The Transition Integrity Project, established in 2020, conducted scenario exercises focused on risks surrounding the 2020 presidential election and presidential transition. Its published materials describe four exercises held in June 2020, examining threats to the rule of law and democratic-process integrity between Election Day and Inauguration Day.[5]

Scenario planning is routine in military, intelligence, corporate, and governmental practice. Its existence does not itself prove that participants intended to create the outcomes they modeled. Institutions simulate pandemics, coups, cyberattacks, financial crises, contested elections, and military conflicts precisely because they consider those outcomes possible and consequential.

However, scenario exercises are politically significant because they reveal how influential actors define risks, identify legitimate institutional responses, and distribute responsibility among actors. The important questions are what assumptions structured the exercise, which dangers were treated as primary, what actions participants considered lawful or legitimate, who participated, and whether the exercises were purely analytical or connected to operational organizing.

The project’s concerns about a disputed election were not imaginary: Trump ultimately refused to concede the 2020 election and sought to overturn its result. But the later occurrence of a feared event does not convert every scenario exercise into proof of a prearranged political operation. Analysts should be able to acknowledge both facts at once: contingency planning can be legitimate, and its assumptions and proposed remedies can still deserve close scrutiny.

When Foreign Techniques Return Home

The United States has spent decades supporting democracy-promotion, election-assistance, civil-society, media-development, and rule-of-law programs abroad. Institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute helped develop a global infrastructure for political training, civic organization, electoral support, and strategic communications.

These programs have often been defended as assistance to democratic actors operating under authoritarian or hybrid regimes. Critics have argued that they can also become instruments of geopolitical competition or regime change. Both perspectives contain part of the truth: democracy assistance can genuinely strengthen civil society, while the same techniques can be employed strategically by states seeking political leverage abroad.

The deeper consequence is that political influence has become professionalized and transferable. Techniques developed in one country can be studied, adapted, commercialized, and redeployed elsewhere. Leadership development, activist training, election monitoring, voter-mobilization systems, strategic communications, digital organizing, litigation, diaspora engagement, and coalition-building all form part of a transferable repertoire of political influence.

The issue is not that political organization is inherently illegitimate. Democratic politics requires organization. The issue is that these methods can be used by governments, parties, NGOs, corporations, donors, foreign states, and transnational networks to shape the political environment around formal state institutions.

Serbia, Ukraine, and Capacity Building

The campaign against Slobodan Milošević in Serbia in 2000 illustrates how political networks can be deliberately cultivated. Western organizations provided support to Serbian opposition forces, including the youth movement Otpor. The case showed that sustained assistance can help develop organizers, communications strategies, opposition coordination, and public-pressure campaigns.

It does not follow that outside actors can simply manufacture a mass political movement from nothing. Otpor’s appeal depended on Serbian political conditions, accumulated public frustration, domestic opposition activity, and the vulnerabilities of the Milošević regime. External support increased capacity; it did not erase local agency.

The same distinction matters in Ukraine. Western governments and NGOs supported civil society, media, democratic development, and election-related institutions over many years. Those programs contributed to the capacity of domestic actors during events including the 2004 Orange Revolution. But Ukrainian political mobilization was rooted in domestic grievances, electoral disputes, elite conflict, regional identity, and public participation.

Outside assistance can strengthen an existing movement’s organizational capacity without creating that movement. Funding can create dependence or influence without establishing total command. A movement can be genuinely domestic while benefiting from external institutional support. Its legitimacy depends on domestic agency, public support, transparency, and methods—not merely on whether foreign assistance exists.

This framework applies abroad and at home. Capacity building matters because well-funded organizations can persist through electoral cycles, recruit talent, preserve institutional knowledge, and outlast short-term political movements.

Philanthropy and the Politics of Selection

George Soros and the Open Society network are prominent examples of modern philanthropic power. For decades, Soros-linked entities have funded organizations working in democracy promotion, human rights, criminal justice, public health, journalism, education, and political advocacy.

It is inaccurate to equate funding with total control. Grantees may disagree with funders, pursue independent strategies, or operate under legal and institutional constraints. But it is equally inaccurate to deny that sustained funding creates political capacity.

Philanthropy’s deepest political function is selection. Funders decide which problems receive institutional attention, which organizations can hire staff, which legal strategies are developed, which researchers obtain support, and which issues accumulate the expertise necessary to become politically actionable.

Over time, funding can sustain research programs that define a policy problem, fellowships that train future professionals, litigation that establishes legal precedent, conferences that consolidate elite networks, media initiatives that shape public narratives, advocacy organizations that mobilize constituencies, and policy shops that translate ideas into legislation and executive action.

This is not unique to progressive philanthropy. Comparable ecosystems exist across the ideological spectrum. Conservative institutions, including the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, have demonstrated how long-term investment in legal scholarship, personnel recruitment, intellectual infrastructure, and policy development can reshape judicial and executive institutions.

Political durability depends on institutional reproduction. A movement becomes powerful when it can continuously reproduce its personnel, ideas, organizations, and funding sources across generations.

The Intelligence-Community Question

The involvement of former military, intelligence, and national-security officials in political life is normal in a democratic republic. Former officers advise campaigns. Retired diplomats join think tanks. Former intelligence officials write books, appear in media, participate in advocacy, work in academia, and run for office.

The danger lies in collapsing three distinct categories. The first is a former official: someone with prior government experience and professional credibility. The second is an informal network: personal or professional relationships among people with shared backgrounds. The third is institutional influence: the ability of a current agency or office to direct, authorize, or coordinate conduct.

A former official may have influence without current authority. The fact that a former CIA officer addresses intelligence personnel does not establish CIA involvement. Likewise, shared military experience among lawmakers does not establish that the armed forces endorse their political message.

Slotkin’s background mattered because it affected the reception of the message. As a former CIA officer with Defense Department and National Security Council experience, she could speak with recognizable insider credibility to national-security communities. That helps explain the political significance of the video, but it does not provide evidence that intelligence agencies coordinated it.

The proper standard is evidence-based. Claims of agency direction should require demonstrable institutional links: official communications, funding relationships, tasking, documented coordination, orders, or credible testimony. Professional biography alone is not enough.

Military Obedience and Constitutional Order

The six lawmakers’ video rested on a legally valid core principle: service members are required to obey lawful orders, not unlawful ones. The video stated that military personnel could—and in certain circumstances must—refuse orders that violate the law or Constitution.

Yet the principle is easier to state than to administer. Service members do not possess a free-floating authority to reject orders based on personal political judgment, disagreement with presidential policy, or subjective beliefs about legitimacy. The military justice system, chain of command, legal advisers, inspectors general, and courts exist in part to distinguish illegal orders from merely controversial, unpopular, or difficult ones.

The constitutional danger runs in both directions. Uncritical obedience threatens constitutional government when it treats presidential authority as unlimited. But politicized resistance threatens constitutional government when officers or enlisted personnel begin treating partisan actors as alternative sources of command authority.

The essential principle is not unconditional obedience or partisan defiance. It is disciplined adherence to law, constitutional process, and the lawful chain of command.

The Private State and Network Power

The term “private state” describes the expanding collection of private institutions that increasingly perform functions once associated primarily with government: policy design, intelligence analysis, public communication, litigation, personnel screening, foreign-policy advocacy, data collection, and strategic planning.

Foundations finance research. Think tanks convert research into policy proposals. Law firms litigate or draft legislation. Advocacy groups mobilize public pressure. Media institutions legitimize particular narratives. Campaigns recruit the personnel who may later govern. Former officials move among all of these institutions.

No single actor must command the entire system for it to shape state policy. Network power frequently works by changing the environment in which decisions are made. It determines which experts are available, which ideas are treated as credible, which proposals arrive in finished form, and which risks decision-makers learn to prioritize.

This is why network power is often difficult to see. It rarely appears as an instruction reading, “Adopt this policy.” Instead, it appears as the cumulative production of a policy world in which one option seems practical, responsible, well-supported, and professionally safe while alternatives appear unrealistic, uninformed, or outside elite consensus.

Foreign Influence and Geopolitical Competition

Foreign governments understand that influence no longer operates only through formal diplomacy or direct contact with elected officials. States use business relationships, technology partnerships, universities, media, diaspora communities, lobbying firms, charitable giving, think tanks, and strategic investment to shape the ecosystem surrounding government.

Russia, China, Iran, Gulf states, and other actors employ varying combinations of these tools. The goal is often not direct control of a president or legislature. It is to influence the information environment, elite incentives, commercial interests, public narratives, and institutional assumptions through which state decisions are made.

Small states can achieve disproportionate strategic relevance when they cultivate dense relational networks. Qatar, for example, has used diplomacy, investment, media, higher-education partnerships, defense relationships, and mediation roles to exert influence beyond what its geographic size or conventional military power would predict.

This is the contemporary logic of influence: access, capital, expertise, technology, narrative legitimacy, and network density can matter as much as traditional military power.

Network Capture and Democratic Resilience

Influence is not the same as control. A network becomes potentially capture-like when it repeatedly reproduces the same assumptions, personnel, incentives, and policy preferences across several institutions at once.

This risk is particularly serious in national security, where specialized expertise creates barriers to entry. Presidents, congressional staff, journalists, and citizens often depend on a relatively narrow pool of experts to interpret classified issues, military threats, intelligence assessments, arms-control questions, and alliance commitments. If that pool becomes intellectually homogeneous or financially dependent on a limited set of institutions, the range of plausible policy options may narrow before democratic deliberation even begins.

The appropriate response is not to criminalize opposition, philanthropy, advocacy, or professional association. It is to strengthen democratic safeguards:

• Require meaningful transparency regarding funding, governance, foreign relationships, and advocacy activity.
• Enforce foreign-agent registration and disclosure laws consistently and fairly.
• Preserve genuine ideological and institutional pluralism.
• Strengthen conflict-of-interest standards for former officials and government contractors.
• Protect lawful dissent while rejecting attempts to politicize the military or intelligence community.
• Maintain clear firewalls between intelligence work and partisan political activity.
• Improve public access to information about influence networks without treating association as guilt.

The Core Challenge

The principal challenge is not the discovery of a single hidden controller. It is the emergence of a densely connected environment in which public authority and private influence become difficult to distinguish.

Modern political power is exercised through institutional ecosystems. Those ecosystems can produce expertise, continuity, democratic participation, and policy innovation. They can also create opacity, elite insulation, foreign vulnerability, and self-reinforcing consensus.

The task for democratic societies is therefore twofold: identify genuine institutional capture and foreign interference where evidence warrants it, while preserving the rights of citizens and organizations to advocate, associate, fund ideas, and oppose those in power.

A healthy republic does not demand that political networks disappear. It requires that they remain visible, contestable, legally bounded, and subordinate to constitutional government.