When I think of political control and Bitcoin I think of people who have the power to build a consensus for a hard fork. It wouldn't really make sense for someone controlling 51% of the network to hack the network. Then all their bitcoins would be useless because everyone else would abandon the network.
They could do short, targeted 51% attacks without doing much harm to the value of Bitcoin. In 2013 Ghash.io a mining pool had an employee who carried out mining based doublespends against a gambling site [0]. Very few people abandoned the network because very few people were impacted by this attack.
The Ghash double spend was a pretty big deal, and instigated a big campaign by miners to switch away from the Ghash pool. So it was costly for the pool, and it was probably not happy about its employee executing it.
Any player that directly owns 51% of the hash power, rather than just pooling, would similarly be economically incentivized to avoid such double spends, as they provide very little payout, while undermining confidence in the protoocl.
