Former President Donald Trump has recently been found guilty on 34 felony counts having to do with a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels for falsifying records. Remember, Trump used his own money and did not write it off from his income taxes. Trump violated no campaign laws even though Alvin Bragg claimed the money was a campaign contribution.
In Hillary’s case the amount of money is nearly $6 million and was never listed as campaign contributions. That is about 45 times greater than the amount attributed to Trump. The entire amount was a political contribution from SuperPAC Correct the Record, which coordinated with Hillary’s campaign. The money was used for a wide range of coordinated activities to support Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The court said:
“In an administrative complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission, nonprofit watchdog Campaign Legal Center alleges that Correct the Record spent close to $6 million in coordination with the Clinton campaign during the lead-up to the 2016 election, including to conduct polls, hire teams of round-the-clock factcheckers, and connect Clinton media surrogates with radio and television news outlets.”
The ruling said:
“But it characterized all of the committee’s myriad expenditures — from staff salaries and travel expenses to the cost of commissioning polls and renting offices — as ‘inputs’ to unpaid communications over the internet. For that reason, neither Correct the Record nor the Clinton campaign designated any of Correct the Record’s expenditures as contributions to the campaign.”
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL“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.”
“As to those expenditures that it deemed not to be covered by the internet exemption, the Commission acted contrary to law in dismissing the complaint for want of reason to believe the relevant expenditures were coordinated with the campaign, despite plausible allegations that Correct the Record coordinated all its expenditures with Hillary for America — and openly acknowledged doing so.”
The Washington D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign and an affiliated super PAC violated federal election law in spending that totaled close to $6 million.
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.
But 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 three-judge panel noted that Correct the Record coordinated all these activities with Clinton’s campaign.
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 FEC had dismissed the complaint against the Clinton campaign and Correct the Record, citing an internet exemption had allowed them not to list the coordination between the two, but the D.C. Circuit Court found that decision was in error.
In a separate matter, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee agreed in 2022 to pay $113,000 to settle an FEC investigation into alleged violations of campaign finance law in relation to funding the infamous Steele dossier during the 2016 race, according to the Associated Press.
“The Clinton campaign hired Perkins Coie, which then hired Fusion GPS, a research and intelligence firm, to conduct opposition research on Republican candidate Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. But on FEC forms, the Clinton campaign classified the spending as legal services,” the AP said.
