Authoritarian Interference

David Salvo is managing director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) at GMF. An expert in Russian affairs, Salvo has been analyzing the Kremlin’s authoritarian toolkit to undermine democracy at home and abroad throughout his career.  

Salvo has worked at ASD since 2017, first as a resident fellow and then as deputy director. He is the principal author of The ASD Policy Blueprint for Countering Authoritarian Interference in Democracies and makes regular media appearances, including on NPR, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and ABC News, to discuss US-Russian relations, Russian foreign policy toward its near abroad, and Russian tactics and objectives to undermine democracy in the United States and Europe. 

Prior to joining GMF, Salvo was a foreign service officer in the US Department of State, serving most recently as the deputy secretary of state’s policy advisor for Europe, Eurasia, and international security issues. He also advised senior-level State Department negotiators on the protracted conflicts in the South Caucasus, worked on US policy toward NATO and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and served overseas in Russia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. He speaks Russian and Serbo-Croatian and has a basic knowledge of French. 

David received his master’s degree from Georgetown University’s Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies and a bachelor’s degree in government and Russian from Georgetown. He is an avid music lover and plays in several DC-area bands, including a tribute to the renowned rock band Phish. 

Bret Schafer is a senior fellow, Media and Digital Disinformation, for the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Bret is the creator and manager of Hamilton 2.0, an online open-source dashboard tracking the outputs of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state media outlets, diplomats, and government officials. As an expert in computational propaganda, state-backed information operations, and tech regulation, he has spoken at conferences around the globe and advised numerous governments and international organizations. His research has appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, and he has been interviewed on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the BBC. Prior to joining GMF, he spent more than ten years in the television and film industry, including stints at Cartoon Network and as a freelance writer for Warner Brothers. He also worked in Budapest as a radio host and in Berlin as a semi-professional baseball player in Germany’s Bundesliga. He has a BS in communications with a major in radio/television/film from Northwestern University, and a master’s in public diplomacy from the University of Southern California, where he was the editor-in-chief of Public Diplomacy Magazine.

Lindsay Gorman is managing director and senior fellow of GMF’s Technology Program. She is also a venture scientist with Deep Science Ventures focused on AI and biotechnology. A quantum physicist and computer scientist by training, Gorman leads work on the US-China emerging technology competition, AI and democracy, and transatlantic innovation. 

Gorman recently served in the Biden White House as a senior adviser on emerging technology, national security, and democracy issues. At the Office of Science and Technology and the National Security Council, she crafted US technology competition and national security strategy and led international technology initiatives through the US-EU Trade and Technology Council and Quad. In particular, she founded and led the AI cooperation workstream in the Trade and Technology Council. She was also the principal architect of the Advancing Technology for Democracy agenda of the Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal. 

Gorman’s career spans fifteen years at the intersection of technology and international security. She is the former CEO of a technology consulting firm she founded, Politech Advisory. She has served as an expert contributor to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission; technology adviser to US Senator Mark Warner; consultant to Schmidt Futures on 5G; and fellow with the National Academy of Sciences. Her technical background includes building self-driving cars for the DARPA Urban Challenge and pioneering experiments on topological insulators, which she published in Nature Physics.

Gorman regularly delivers keynote addresses and speaks at popular conferences such as South by Southwest. She has testified before the US Senate and US House on AI, cybersecurity, and technology innovation. Her research and analyses have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, and she frequently appears in TV and radio interviews on CNN, MSNBC, CBS’s Face the Nation, NPR, the BBC, and Bloomberg. She is also a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Truman National Security Project, and an awardee of the US State Department Speaker Program. Gorman holds a BA in Physics from Princeton University and an MS in Applied Physics from Stanford University. 

Josh Rudolph is managing director and senior fellow of GMF’s Strategic Democracy Initiatives. He has two decades of high-level experience at the intersection of finance and national security across the US government, multilaterals, think tanks, academia, and Wall Street.

At GMF since 2019, Rudolph has launched several programming initiatives that elevate think tank research and civil society coalitions focused on emerging autocratic threats to democracy. These GMF initiatives have analyzed malign authoritarian financial interference in elections, national security threats from unregulated money launderers, international development aid to counter kleptocracy, homegrown toolkits of autocratic corruption in Turkey and Poland, Ukrainian governance reforms amid war and reconstruction, US civil-military relations in the context of democratic backsliding, and democracy promotion in the United States.

Before joining GMF, Rudolph served in a range of US government positions dealing with finance and national security, including as senior fellow on USAID’s anti-corruption task force, adviser to the US executive director at the International Monetary Fund, director of international economics at the White House National Security Council, and deputy director of the US Treasury markets room. Before beginning his public service, Rudolph worked for seven years at J.P. Morgan as an investment banker and financial markets research strategist.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from Babson College and a master’s degree in public policy with a concentration in international trade and finance from the Harvard Kennedy School. 

Mareike Ohlberg is a senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Program and leads the Stockholm China Forum. She is based at GMF’s Berlin Office. Before joining GMF, Mareike worked as an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, where she focused on China’s media and digital policies as well as the Chinese Communist Party’s influence campaigns in Europe. Prior to that, she was an An Wang postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and a postdoctoral fellow at Shih-Hsin University in Taipei. She spent several years living and working in Greater China. She is co-author of the book Hidden Hand: How the Communist Party of China is Reshaping the World (2020). Mareike has a doctoral degree in Chinese studies from the University of Heidelberg and a master’s degree in East Asian regional studies from Columbia University. She is a frequent commentator in the media on the global implications of China’s rise.