>I’m convinced that the government doesn’t believe citizens are any more loyal or hard to bribe than other people, but insisting on citizenship would make it easier to charge us with particular crimes if the need arose
Hm.. I definitely feel it's easier to mitigate some risk by using US citizens. One of the goals is to limit possibility of foreign interference via these citizens. By using your own people, you can track their interactions with foreign entities via their trips outside of the US and their self documented contacts with foreign nationals. It'd be a lot harder to track these things when you hire someone from a different country because you're not going to have as meticulous records and all their friends and family are liable to be foreign nationals.
Hm.. I definitely feel it's easier to mitigate some risk by using US citizens. One of the goals is to limit possibility of foreign interference via these citizens. By using your own people, you can track their interactions with foreign entities via their trips outside of the US and their self documented contacts with foreign nationals. It'd be a lot harder to track these things when you hire someone from a different country because you're not going to have as meticulous records and all their friends and family are liable to be foreign nationals.