Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Rogi, and today we're talking about the serious and widespread problem of doping in competitive sports. My guest is Paul Massaro, a policy advisor of the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe,

better known as the Helsinki Commission, where his portfolio includes, among many other topics,

anti-corruption and sanctions.

Paul, thank you for joining me.

Glad to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation, Alexandra.

Why do you start by describing the work of the Helsinki Commission for people who are

unfamiliar with it? So the Helsinki Commission for people who are unfamiliar with it?

So the Helsinki Commission is really this neat little, unique quasi-committee on Capitol Hill.

We're structured much like a committee. We have a chairman and a ranking member, except unlike

a regular committee, we have two chairman and two ranking members. We have a chair and a co-chair,

and then a ranking member in each chamber.

We're bicameral and bipartisan. We're led by nine senators and nine representatives.

And our work is to monitor compliance with international standards, specifically, you know,

related to what we call the first dimension military affairs, second dimension, that is, anti-corruption,

sanctions, economics, stuff like that, that's me. And then third dimension, human rights,

democracy, and humanitarian affairs. And this all comes from the Helsinki Final Act back in

1975. We were founded one year later by Congress to sort of monitor the implementation

of this. Since then, we've kind of grown and taken on a number of new assignments, and now we

function like we do today. Can we turn now to your work specifically on the Rajchenkov Anti-Doping Act,

which is what we want to talk about today and how that

fits into the project there. As I discussed, they cover internationally anti-corruption,

sanctions issues, all sorts of stuff. But, you know, the big thing that I'm always looking at is

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