A leftist jury in New York claimed that President Donald Trump violated campaign spending laws with his personal hush money payoff to a porn star, and returned guilty verdicts to 34 felonies.
A federal court decided Hillary Clinton violated essentially the same spending reporting requirements when her campaign coordinated, illegally, on spending campaigns with a political action committee.
She gets a scolding.
It is the Washington Examiner that reported the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Clinton and the superpac called Correct the Record improperly used an “internet exemption” to get around restrictions they wanted to avoid to set up a “Benghazi Hearing War Room” and pursue a “witch hunt” of critics.
They wanted to do all this without reporting the work as a campaign expense, the report said.
But the court said the campaign, in 2016 when Clinton lost her second attempt to be elected to the White House, crossed election laws by flaunting their coordinated efforts.
The report said, “Neither Clinton nor Correct the Record founder David Brock will be punished under the 36-page decision that instead scolded the Federal Election Commission for not investigating a complaint about the spending. It sent the case to the FEC to fix the exemption.”
“We hold that the Commission acted contrary to law in dismissing the complaint. Because we conclude that the internet exemption cannot be read to exempt from disclosure those expenditures that are only tangentially related to an eventual internet message or post, the commission’s reading of the internet exemption stretches it beyond lawful limits,” the court concluded.
FEC chief Sean Cooksey responded, “My colleagues and I will carefully review the court’s opinion and consider next steps, including whether to seek review in the Supreme Court. Regardless, I will continue to fight for internet freedom at the FEC and a robust regulatory exemption for political activities online, consistent with the law.”
The dispute dates to 2016 when Brock set up his group and announced his plans would be coordinated with the Clinton campaign, in apparent violation of rules barring PAC and candidates from scheming together, the report said.
The court found that Clinton’s campaign was obligated to acknowledge the spending as a campaign donation.
“The court said that Brock’s group spent $5.95 million and hid its spending behind the internet exception that was created to protect freewheeling online political commentary and low-dollar support for candidates,” the report said.
“The amount in question is more than 45 times the $130,000 a Manhattan court convicted former President Donald Trump of misreporting in business records during the same 2016 campaign.
“It should be noted that the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department looked at the payments Trump made through his personal attorney at the time, Michael Cohen, to adult film star Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement and declined to prosecute him,” it said.
But in what is widely seen as part of the Democrats’ “lawfare” against Trump, “Democrat Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg chose to bring the case under New York law, bootstrapping the alleged FEC violation as an underlying crime to the state business record violations.”
The expenses were listed as legal expenses, as they were paid to a lawyer for a settlement issue.
The Clinton case involved neither organization reporting the campaign spending.
“In other words, Correct the Record committed FEC ‘business record’ violations, if you will, by failing to properly account for money spent to help the Clinton campaign,” the report said.
Previously, the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee agreed in 2022 to pay $113,000 in fines to resolve an FEC investigation into her campaign’s decision to fund the infamous Steele dossier – opposition research documentation that actually was fabricated – and call it legal expenses.
The report continued, “That’s interesting, because that’s exactly the violation Bragg said the Trump Organization committed in relation to paying Cohen.”
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