A perversion of a democratic election
The narrative is becoming clearer.
In the narrative that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and New York prosecutors are building, Mr. Trump continued to secretly seek to do business in Russia deep into his presidential campaign even as Russian agents made more efforts to influence him. At the same time, in this account he ordered hush payments to two women to suppress stories of impropriety in violation of campaign finance law.
The prosecutors made clear in a sentencing memo filed on Friday that they viewed efforts by Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to squelch the stories as nothing less than a perversion of a democratic election — and by extension they effectively accused the president of defrauding voters, questioning the legitimacy of his victory.
The Republicans are trying to paint it as a nothingburger, and to convince us that Trump didn’t know it was illegal.
But if Trump didn’t know it was illegal…what was his understanding of why Cohen kept the hush money a secret? To put it another way, did Cohen pretend to Trump that it was all legal and aboveboard? If so, why? Why would he put himself in jeopardy to keep Trump out of it?
The exposure on campaign finance laws poses a challenge to Mr. Trump’s legal team, which before now has focused mainly on rebutting allegations of collusion and obstruction while trying to call into question Mr. Mueller’s credibility.
“Until now, you had two different charges, allegations, whatever you want to call them,” Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the incoming Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in an interview on Saturday. “One was collusion with the Russians. One was obstruction of justice and all that entails. And now you have a third — that the president was at the center of a massive fraud against the American people.”
And not just any old fraud but one that put him in all his corruption and incompetence in the White House. The fraud in question gave him the power to destroy the planet.
(Not for the first time, I feel the need to point out that a country that has weapons that can destroy the planet should have much better filters to keep corrupt egomaniacs from having the sole power to launch them.)
Which is about the last card in the pack for a defence at law. Still, if Trump has nothing else, it is probably worth a try. Come to think of it, a plea of general ignorance rather than anything specific is probably Trump’s best bet.
If one gets behind the wheel of a car, it is generally expected that a) you know how to drive a car and b) familiar with the basic rules of the road. Ignorance of the finer details of election laws is maybe excusable, but the broader strokes of spending limits, contribution limits, etc. should be ever present in your mind, or that of your campaign staff. It’s clear that Trump knows sweet fuck all about anything and everything related to the office he occupies, so ignorance of election regulations is par for the course for him. In any normal candidacy, ignorance of such regulations would be inexcusable.
The fact that Trump/Cohen tried to hush these stories up indicates that at least one of them knew the stories would look bad for candidate Trump (which if it was Trump himself who had this awareness, it’s one of the few instances where there’s a glimmer of theory of mind in that awful orange noggin). Trying to keep the payments secret also shows that at least one of them thought they were bad/wrong/illegal or something. You don’t need an NDA if there’s nothing to Disclose, no hush money if there’s nothing to Hush.
Yes indeed. I hope that somebody gets to work on that once the orange nightmare has been removed, and Pence after him. (I hope Pence is found to have been in on some or any of this shit so he gets canned to.)
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. You can’t very well not be secret about hush money payments, or that defeats the point. Even if perfectly legal, you’re not going to advertise that you’re paying hush money to a porn star and a Playboy model. So he had plenty of reason to keep it secret even if he didn’t realize it was illegal.
Or am I misunderstanding your point?
Always.
Ha, I don’t think that’s entirely fair.
It’s mostly fair though. You do frustratingly often ignore the point of the post as a whole for the sake of zeroing in on some pedantic correction or nitpick. As I’ve mentioned, you do it so much I can recognize your comments before I see the name.
I don’t think this is a nothingburger, but I don’t think it’s an impeachmentburger either.
As best I can tell, paying hush money in itself isn’t actually illegal. In this case it’s only illegal if it was paid from campaign funds or it was paid from other sources to benefit the campaign, and hence an illegal campaign contribution.
So far it sounds like it fits Trump’s situation, but the catch is if Trump could convincingly argue it was in his interest to do this regardless of the campaign, then it might be legal. He could argue he wanted to pay the hush money so his wife didn’t find out or so it didn’t hurt future business interests, for example.
In a somewhat similar situation, John Edwards had an affair and essentially paid hush money to his mistress during a campaign, and he ultimately wasn’t convicted of anything.
But maybe Trump’s argument that it wasn’t campaign-related fails. Now what? Hard to say. Maybe they’ll slap him with a big fine. Maybe worse.
But if the “Russian investigation” ends with nothing more than charges for hiding sex scandals, you can take it to the bank that he’s not going to be removed from office over this. I think he’s probable that enough Democrats will break ranks that he won’t even get impeached.
That’s because I’m generally (but of course not always) in agreement with the main point of the post but sometimes feel part of it is incorrect or overstated.
Skeletor, not that I am a lawyer, let alone a US lawyer specialising in elections. But from listening to those who are it doesn’t sound as if having multiple reasons for doing something, makes an illegal thing legal. That would be consistent with how law works throughout the West. I can’t for instance evade tax so that my partner doesn’t discover that I lost my pay check gambling. Loosing my pay check gambling is not illegal. Finding money to hide the fact from my partner isn’t of itself illegal; but evading tax sure as hell is illegal no matter what my motivation for the crime.
Rob,
That part of my post relied on this Politifact article:
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/aug/23/donald-trump-and-hush-money-it-legal-it-worse-jayw/
I think your gambling analogy is good, but what is the clear illegal thing Trump did?
The argument seems to be that Trump directed Cohen to make the payments, and that constitutes an illegal campaign contribution to Trump’s campaign. A counter argument is that Cohen was always Trump’s “fixer” and did this kind of thing for years, campaign or not.
If that’s the clear illegal thing and future courts agree, then, sure, as I said above, Trump will probably pay some price, but I don’t think the price will be removal from office.
The argument that Cohen always did this, as Trump’s fixer, does not make it legal.
I suspect Trump has done many illegal things. Many of them he appears to have done in plain sight. I suspect he has violated the Constitution. He appears to have violated the emoluments clause gleefully and in plain sight (I say appears because IANAL, and I am not on a jury hearing evidence), and that is illegal.
I agree that he will not likely be removed from office, but I feel it has nothing to do with whether he did anything wrong or not. I imagine there is plenty on which he could be removed, illegal dealings or the 25th Amendment, it doesn’t matter. I just don’t think the Senate will likely do it, unless the Republican senators begin to believe he has become a liability. And the more nasty and illegal things he does, the more his base appear to love him.
You, on the other hand, appear determined to declare that nothing you’ve seen so far is clearly illegal, though many attorneys appear to believe otherwise. Perhaps you are a super attorney, super smarter and super more knowledgeable than the attorneys that have worked in government capacity for so many years? Or are you just a pest?
I think Skeletor is just saying that Trump could use the defense that there are other reasons to keep things secret than knowing that his actions were illegal. In other words, as Skeletor said, Trump could claim that he just told Cohen to sort out the hush-payments – as he might have done in the past – so that the damaging stories wouldn’t come out during his campaign, not knowing that the money would come from campaign funds. Generally, of course, ignorance of the law is no defense, but unless there’s direct evidence that Trump authorised the money to be paid out of campain funds, Skeletor is arguing that it seems unlikely – in itself alone – likely to get him impeached at this stage.
Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true. It would be enough to be rid of any previous president in history, but the game has changed substantially now.
Fortunately, this doesn’t exist in isolation and I’d be very surprised if there were not more evidence than Cohen’s say-so. I doubt a plea bargain would be offered if Cohen couldn’t produce evidence, there is rumour that he made lots of notes and recorded conversations and Trump has been made contradictory statements in the past about where the money came from.
I think I see where Skeletor is coming from and have had similar concerns, but I find it hard to believe that Mueller hasn’t done his homework or would be headlining these particular charges if he didn’t have very strong evidence indeed.
Correct me if I’m wrong (which is too often the case) but I thought that the problem wasn’t the payment of hush money per se but rather the timing of the payments and the source of the money. It was done to prevent information being made public that was potentially harmful to Trump’s campaign and the funding came from somebody involved with the campaign, if not from Trump himself then almost certainly on his instruction and/or with his knowledge.
Ugh. Skeletor @ 8 – I don’t care why you do it, I care that you do it and I wish you would stop. It makes for a crap style of commenting, this abrupt swooping in to say “that’s wrong” and then swooping out again, ignoring all replies. Rinse, repeat.
As I understand it the money doesn’t even need to come from campaign funds to be illegal. Regardless of where it comes from if the funds benefit the campaign they have to be declared by the entity that provides them. This didn’t happen. The fact the money apparently came from Trumps campaign funds just sheets it home direct to him.
I also find it amazing that Trump and his closest circle repeatedly use the “too incompetent to know” defence. When are people – his supporters – going to say, shit, he’s incompetent?
Rob @15,
In fact, more specifically, if Trump had used his own personal funds to pay the hush money, it probably would have been legal.
I am in no way an expert in campaign finance law, but from what I’ve picked up over the past two years of this nightmare we’re all living in, the salient points are these:
1. Campaign funds must be used for legitimate campaign purposes. Protecting the candidate’s reputation probably qualifies, so using campaign funds to buy silence and suppress negative stories likely counts. (So why didn’t Trump use campaign funds for the hush money? Because campaign expenditures have to be reported and get scrutinized by the media.)
2. If non-campaign funds are used to pay a campaign’s expenses, that counts as a contribution to the campaign and is subject to the same rules (i.e. disclosure requirements and dollar limits) as a cash contribution. The rationale is obvious: I can only donate $2,700 per year to the Benson for President campaign, but hey, I could pay the hotel bill for the entire BfP campaign team in Iowa and New Hampshire, and charter a jet for them, and rent the venue for the rallies, and…. well, no, I can’t, because those would all be deemed contributions.
3. Loans are campaign contributions, too. Again, this is to close an obvious loophole. “Oh, I only donated the legally allowed $2,700 to Benson for President. That other $100,000 check was a loan. I’m sure BfP (an entity with no assets other than the campaign money it spends almost as quickly as it comes in) will pay me back someday. Uh-huh. For sure!” If American Media, Inc. (owner of the National Enquirer) advanced $140,000 on behalf of the Trump Campaign, that’s a loan. If Michael Cohen advanced $140,000 on behalf of the campaign to pay AMI, that’s a loan.
In other words, as far as I can determine, this isn’t about a misuse of campaign funds. (It’s possible the Trump Campaign did that, too — e.g., if they were paying more than a fair rate for all those Trump jets and hotels etc, then that’s essentially diverting campaign money.) It’s about illegally circumventing the contribution limits and the disclosure requirements that go with them.
See also my comment in the more recent post about why I think disguising the payment as legal fees shows intent to violate the campaign laws.
That second-last sentence should say “illegally” circumventing — this isn’t some clever legal work-around.
Done.
One new, not terribly surprising, development: American Media, Inc. (owner of the Enquirer) entered into a plea bargain. Part of the deal is that AMI admits “that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.”
Bit by bit, the prosecutors are building their tower of evidence. Trump is so out of his element in dealing with Mueller. Trump’s view of strategy is that you are either throwing punches or else you’re losing; hell, even if you ARE losing, you keep throwing punches so people don’t think you’re losing. He has no concept of someone like Mueller, who has not said a word publicly while Trump flails away against him on Twitter almost daily, but quietly goes about his business to devastating eventual effect.
Ha I just saw that via Natasha Bertrand on Twitter and was (am) about to blog it.