The attempt to turn the Stormy Daniels unpleasantness into a campaign finance violation — a weak attempt as it tuns out — is starting to come into focus as a new Federal Elections Commission (FEC) complaint filed by The Committee to Defend the President alleges the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) was “us[ing] state chapters as straw men to circumvent campaign donation limits and launder(ing) the money back to her campaign.”
Dan Backer, the campaign finance attorney who filed the complaint, writes in Investors Business Daily that the scheme puts the conviction of filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who was prosecuted “for giving a handful of associates money they then contributed to a candidate of his preference” to shame.
HVF solicited six-figure donations from major donors, including Calvin Klein and “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane, and routed them through state parties en route to the Clinton campaign. Roughly $84 million may have been laundered in what might be the single largest campaign finance scandal in U.S. history.
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Here’s what you can’t do, which the Clinton machine appeared to do anyway. As the Supreme Court made clear in McCutcheon v. FEC, the JFC may not solicit or accept contributions to circumvent base limits, through “earmarks” and “straw men” that are ultimately excessive — there are five separate prohibitions here.
On top of that, six-figure donations either never actually passed through state party accounts or were never actually under state party control, which adds false FEC reporting by HVF, state parties, and the DNC to the laundry list.
Finally, as Donna Brazile and others admitted, the DNC placed the funds under the Clinton campaign’s direct control, a massive breach of campaign finance law that ties the conspiracy together.
Democratic donors, knowing the funds would end up with Clinton’s campaign, wrote six-figure checks to influence the election — 100 times larger than allowed.
HVF bundled these megagifts and, on a single day, reported transferring money to all participating state parties, some of which would then show up on FEC reports filed by the DNC as transferring the exact same dollar amount on the exact same day to the DNC. Yet not all the state parties reported either receiving or transferring those sums.
It’s getting to the point that as soon as one of the leaders of the progressive movement over the last 20 odd years in this country starts pointing a finger at a political opponent accusing them of some scandal or potential illegal activity, it’s generally a good sign that the progressive leader may be engaged in it themselves.