Originally Posted by
Oneuli
It wasn't an excuse -- I was pointing out the ways that your hypothetical varied from what we're discussing.
What's funny about conservatives is how they so often build the defeat of their arguments right into those arguments. OBVIOUSLY, the problem would by if they DIDN'T pay for the valuable information. Then the information would be a campaign donation.
Think it through. Let's say there's a law limiting individual contributions to a campaign to $2000 and you're running for office. And say I sell buttons and you pay me $5000 for $5000 worth of campaign buttons. Did I violate the campaign law? Of course not. I was compensated at fair market value for what I sold to the campaign, therefore it wasn't a donation and isn't covered by laws dealing with campaign donations. But say, instead, I handed you $5000 of campaign buttons for free, and even expressly said it was as part of my effort to get you elected. Now, have I violated campaign finance law? Of course I have. It's a donation in kind that exceeds the dollar amount.
And, no, the analysis is no different if it's information. If you offer to pay me $5000 for a report on the social media haunts of undecided voters, so you can target your ads better, and that's a reasonable market rate for that kind of work, then my giving you that information in exchange for the money is not a campaign finance violation, because I've donated nothing. But if I give you a report that would have cost you about $5000 to develop on your own, and I've expressly told you that it's part of my effort to get you elected, and I charge you nothing, then of course it's a campaign finance violation.
Under campaign finance law, he didn't need to. He merely needed to solicit it. As soon as he agreed to a meeting to get that valuable donation of information, he committed a crime.
It doesn't need to exist for soliciting it to be against the law. If I'm a campaign manager and I reach out to the Ayatollah and ask for him to organize a massive social media campaign against the opponent, to help my guy get elected, I've broken the law, by soliciting a thing of value from a foreign national for a campaign. It doesn't matter that the social media campaign doesn't exist at the time I solicit it.
He can try to offer the defense that he was just trying to conduct a private sting operation and was going to turn the information over to authorities. In the same sense, someone who is arrested soliciting illegal drugs can claim he was just trying to help out authorities and would have turned the drugs in if he'd gotten them. Or a John can claim that when he picked up a hooker he was planning to take her back to his hotel room to try to explain to her the error of her ways. A jury is welcome to consider that and decide if it's plausible. But step one is indictment, and it should be the same with Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort. Considering soliciting the information, itself, was a crime, with no need to prove what the person intended to do with it, you'd be hard pressed to convince a jury to nullify the law in that case.
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