And an immediate end to their corporate charter at every chain in the process.

And cops arriving with a warrant to search and preserve their records before even announcing anything.

Seems like this should fall under 18 U.S. Code § 912 - Officer or employee of the United States

Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

It would hinge on whether or not the company could be said to have obtained a "thing of value(PDF)" which if you read the linked PDF you'll see is a complicated question. This passage from the PDF seems relevant to me.

The words “thing of value” “are found in so many criminal statutes throughout the United States that they have in a sense become words of art,” wrote the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. “The word ‘thing’ notwithstanding, the phrase is generally construed to cover intangibles as well as tangibles.”Federal courts have consistently applied an expansive reading to the term “thing of value” in a variety of statutory contexts to include goods and services that have tangible, intangible, or even merely perceived benefits, for example: promises, information, testimony, conjugal visits, and commercially worthless stock.

I would say that gaining the benefit of influencing the outcome of an election should be considered a thing of value for this purpose. If the authorities do not come down hard on this behavior then there is no reason for the billionaire class not to bury every election in false and misleading robocalls that seem to come from reliable and trusted sources.

This is not sedition...

Frankly, sedition has become the new communist or fascist. A word with real meaning, turned into a slur, and then hurled at people with complete disregard for what the word actually means.

I'll go a step further and say that even the legal charges of sedition is something that the pubic should view with great skepticism.

Otherwise, it may becomes the new terrorism boogeyman and the FBI will start entrapping people for that instead, or alongside, the terrorists they create, and then arrest.

Honestly, the investigation shouldn't have been to able to do it this easily.

The only reason I can think of is that the organizers figured their only penalty would be fines and lawyers expenses, as long as they didn't go to the necessary lengths to hide themselves.

They could have purchased pre-existing shell companies, or created one overseas, and used those dummy corps to pay some American VOIP provider to run their automated call campaign.

Maybe they thought that if they did go that route, and somehow eventually got found out, their might actually be consequences.

Who knows. We'll just have to wait and see what comes of this.

I think you meant "secede" but this works too and it's really goddamn funny

It's enough to drive a man to drink.

I'll bet that they will be prosecuted, but they'll get a $50 fine and 2 months of unsupervised probation.

Walter Monk

You know what to do fediverse.