Load All Weasels, Circle the Wagons Defend Trump, Inc. At All Costs

Jr's “Defender-in-Chief”

(Skate & thin ice come to mind)

Source of the following from NY Magazine (Robert Bauer campaign law expert interview). And, also this key question from the Washington Post:

“Can it be a crime to do opposition research by asking foreigners for information?”

Introduction: Mr. Bauer’s analysis is excellent. I have only posted the highlights below, so read check the entire article for the full favor as it were of his complex analysis. The following is in Q&A format. Enjoy - I sure did.

Q: Do you think coordination is potentially an appropriate term for what we’re seeing with the Trump Jr. meeting? 

A: It seems so. I’m not suggesting that all the evidence is in or where it’s ultimately going to lead, but we have email evidence today that somebody with ties to the Russian government, and known by Donald Trump Jr. to have ties to the Russian government, advised that the Russian government was looking to help his father, told him that somebody close to the Russian government — described in an email as a Russian government lawyer — was coming to a meeting to provide some benefit to the campaign. So I don’t see how that isn’t coordinated activity. There’s a party who wants to be helpful to the campaign — in this case, a foreign government — and the campaign ascends to the help and sort of collaborates around, or communicates around, what that help might be.

Q:  There are two categories of laws that may apply not just to Trump Jr., but to the Trump campaign and Russia’s relationship as a whole: federal election laws and criminal conspiracy laws. Is that correct? 

A:  Yeah, and the conspiracy laws connect to the election laws. Because you would have a conspiracy, presumably, should the evidence ultimately support it, to violate the campaign-finance laws. So, the conspiracy would not be free-floating and independent, it would tie directly into the violation of the campaign laws.

Q:  With conspiracy laws, the crime is the agreement itself to commit a crime. It doesn’t matter whether that effort succeeds or is ever carried out.

A:  That’s correct.

Q:  Okay. Federal election laws say that foreign nationals or foreign governments can’t contribute a “thing of value” to a presidential campaign. What does that actually mean?

A:  “Thing of value,” anything of value, also applies to contributions across the board, not just contributions from foreign nationals.

And the theory behind it is fairly straightforward, which is you can, for example, pay for a hall to hold a rally in. Find the cash, pay the rental. Or the owner of the hall can just provide it to you. And if the owner of the hall provides it to you, the owner of the hall’s not providing you with cash, the owner of the hall is providing you with a venue for an event and it’s fundamentally the same thing to you. It’s the same value to you as if, in fact, you had purchased it yourself. So, the “thing of value” limitation is designed to pick up so-called “in-kind” contributions. Not just contributions as cash. Without it, the elections laws would basically be made somewhat nonsensical. There would be no reason to have a contribution limit if the easy way around it was to simply avoid paying cash and to simply provide, in concrete form, whatever it was that the campaign wanted.

Q:  So far, there is no evidence that the Trump campaign had anything to do with the DNC hacks or John Podesta’s leaked emails from last year – but are those things we can consider “things of value” during a campaign? 

A: The hacking of the material and then its release into the public sphere?

Q: Yes.

A:  I think you absolutely can confirm that as a thing of value. President Trump at one point, as a candidate, called upon the Russians  (see the video statement here) to locate the so-called deleted Secretary Clinton emails and said, “I hope you find them.” Later it was said, “Well, maybe he was joking.” 

Well, now it turns out that the campaign was actively looking for this and believed it was very important. I would stress in particular that today the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, said the campaign wanted that material, or wanted negative information on Hillary Clinton very badly.

An important part of the Trump campaign’s strategy was to create major doubts about Hillary Clinton. You recall the chants of “lock her up,” and President Trump at one point said he was going to appoint a prosecutor, he was going to do a direct prosecution of Clinton. And so any material that somebody could acquire that would dramatically support those claims was of exceptional value to the campaign. Whatever this lawyer promised might have been one thing, the stolen emails might have been another.

But one way or the other, they were looking for negative product they thought would be helpful to them on a matter of central strategic significance to the campaign.

Q:  How difficult would it be to litigate a “thing of value” in court?

A:  There’s a complicated line of cases and law that have to do with “what does it mean to coordinate with an organization that’s spending money.” Sometimes, the candidate says, “Well, I’m engaged in free speech. The organization is engaged in free speech.” There has to be some limit to how far you can regulate communication between allies.

So, I go to see somebody who I think is a supporter and I tell that person something about my campaign that I’m trying to accomplish. Three months later the supporter puts advertising on the air. The supporter is going to say, “Well, that’s my free speech. I’m just taking informed speech and putting it on the air.” I don’t know that you can see that free-speech defense applying here. It seems to me – and I think there’s law on this point – the foreign-national prohibition is for a very different purpose and the free-speech interests here are significantly attenuated.

The purpose of the foreign-national prohibition is to defend the larger political community, as a court recently said. This goes to a fundamental question of defining and protecting what we consider to be the political community entitled to participate in the choice of our elected leaders, and so the breadth of the government’s interest, the scope of the government’s interest, is very broad and very strong, and for that reason some of the free-speech defenses in the coordination world, or in the cases of coordination that you oftentimes see in the domestic sphere, don’t have nearly that force. And I don’t think it ultimately would be upheld in the case where we’re talking about involving a foreign government coordinating with a campaign to win an election in the United States.

Q:  And federal election laws also prohibit U.S. nationals from providing substantial assistance to a foreign national?

A:  That’s correct. It prohibits U.S. nationals from assisting foreign nationals in trying to influence an election.

Q:  Does that cover trying — but not necessarily succeeding — to provide substantial assistance?

A:  I don’t know that it’s clear what constitutes substantial assistance or whether it would be a liability to merely attempt to provide substantial assistance. It’s certainly a conspiracy to violate the election laws, as you pointed out.

It doesn’t have to end in a successful attempt. It can be an attempt, in and of itself, to bring about the fulfillment of a foreign national’s goals. If you assume that the Putin regime wants to affect the outcome of the election and the Trump campaign wants to help them do it, the Trump campaign believes it would be destabilizing to the Clinton campaign. It would demoralize the Democrats. The Putin government is delighted to do it because it wants to create a bit of chaos in the course of our election.

And if the Trump campaign goes about actively aiding the Russians in doing this, denying that they’re involved, refusing to condemn them, reading the WikiLeaks emails, you can read all of that as a form of providing substantial assistance to an effort that, we now know from the emails, they understood that the Russian government was undertaking.

My read on all this – as a follower and novice on the legal entanglement we now see unfolding as the ultimate goal – at least that’s what I see and I’m sure others do, too:

1^st:  Op Research in campaigns, yes, all the time – but from a foreign government and their documented operatives – nope – no way, Jose as they say.

2^nd:  “A thing or something of value” (illegal) – what a loaded legal mumbo jumbo loophole definition that we now see in play.

3^rd:  Anything from a foreign source (like from Russia, China, hell, even North Korea) must and should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt and immediately reported to the FBI – w/o hesitation or doubt about it. Jr. did not do that – what not? Obviously: he wanted “something of value” to aid his father in winning, and if that came from Russia, so what. No one would ever that or even suspect that, right?

“I love it” wait, what – damn, that’s what Donnie Jr. said about the “gift” he thought he was getting. So, never mind.

There is nothing about this story to “love” except maybe to see Donald J. Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner (after he loses his security clearance is booted out the White House front door), and Paul Manafort, and then the “big man” himself get full prosecution of the law and then jailed. 

They have earned prosecution, either by slick deals, or total incompetence – either way they are all criminals and must face a jury. 

Hopefully, Mr. Mueller sees it the same way. Fingers crossed in that regard.

As always, thanks for stopping by.