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First Charges Filed in Mueller Investigation

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Junebug said:
"Collusion" is a code word that means "we can't say 'conspiracy' because a 'conspiracy' requires that the object of the agreement be illegal and the campaign engaged in no illegal activity here that anyone knows about, but we need to come up with a word that sounds sinister because Trump."
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Or the media picked a word that people would understand and ran with it. I doubt Mueller is investigating collusion. And thankfully, lying to the FBI or obstructing an investigation IS illegal, even if the underlying conduct being investigated turns out not to be.

Junebug's take here is like walking up to a scene of a guy standing with a gun in his holster standing next to a dead guy on the ground with a gunshot wound to the head and saying "It's not illegal to open carry in this state and there's no law that says you can't stand next to a dead guy. There is NO evidence that a crime has been committed here so everyone just move on.
 
Junebug said:
No it's not. The statute says "thing of value," which wouldn't include things like emails or information about a candidate. Even RChildress agrees with me on this.
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The two of you are wrong.

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/10/15950590/donald-trump-jr-new-york-times-illegal

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...gners-for-information/?utm_term=.7a47a0683562

Common Cause believes it is a crime:

"Experts said there was a clear violation of 52 USC 30121, 36 USC 510, a law that prohibits contributions to campaigns from foreign nationals.

"If these emails are not a hoax, they are the smoking gun showing that Donald Trump Jr. illegally solicited a contribution from a foreign national — in the form of opposition research against Hillary Clinton — as our complaints yesterday alleged," Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, said in a statement after Trump Jr. tweeted out the emails on Tuesday.

Common Cause, a nonpartisan ethics organization, filed a complaint with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and the special counsel leading the FBI's investigation into Russian election meddling, Robert Mueller, on Monday. It came after a series of New York Times stories beginning Saturday detailed the previously unreported meeting of Trump Jr.; Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya; the Trump campaign chair at the time, Paul Manafort; and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner."

From a former FEC member:

"Brendan Fischer, the director of the Federal Election Commission reform program at the Campaign Legal Center, told Business Insider that the FEC had previously interpreted the definition of "other thing of value" to include nonmonetary contributions in relation to the foreign national ban.

"So getting opposition research or dirt on Hillary Clinton, or however they tried to portray it, would constitute a contribution both on the definition of a contribution and on the foreign-national contribution ban," he said. "And then solicitation: Did Trump Jr. solicit the contribution? I think there the answer is also yes."

That leads to the second key passage, which says: "No person shall knowingly solicit, accept, or receive from a foreign national any contribution or donation prohibited by" the law.

Regardless of whether Trump Jr. received any information, which he insists he did not, the solicitation of the meeting violates this statute, Ryan said.

"Whether or not he actually received that information does not matter in the eyes of the law," Ryan said. "Trump's solicitation of the information is what constitutes the violation."

Fischer said the "knowingly" part of the statute was covered by the emails that made clear the purported information was coming from the Russian government.

"Trump Jr. knew that the information was coming from Russia," he said. "He knew he'd be getting something of value from the Russian government."

What was I thinking? Junebug and RCHildress know more than Common Cause and someone whose job it was to interpret and implement election laws.
 
Junebug said:
No it's not. The statute says "thing of value," which wouldn't include things like emails or information about a candidate. Even RChildress agrees with me on this.
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Wait a minute. Emails aren't a "thing." But what about HER emails?
 
Junebug said:
No it's not. The statute says "thing of value," which wouldn't include things like emails or information about a candidate. Even RChildress agrees with me on this.
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Depending on which emails were being discussed in the Don Jr. meeting and by Papadopolous, and the extent of communication between the Trump campaign and Russia, the CFAA was almost certainly violated.

And while agree with you on the proper reading of that regulation, RJ's reading is plausible. Prosecutors have put people away under much more ridiculous readings of statutes.
 
RChildress107 said:
Depending on which emails were being discussed in the Don Jr. meeting and by Papadopolous, and the extent of communication between the Trump campaign and Russia, the CFAA was almost certainly violated.

And while agree with you on the proper reading of that regulation, RJ's reading is plausible. Prosecutors have put people away under much more ridiculous readings of statutes.
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How much would it have cost Trump to hire his own hackers, I mean IT specialists, to break into the DNC and Hillary's emails to steal, I mean retrieve, all that data? Does that make it valuable?
 
Someone has the pee tape, I guarantee it. And I think when that gets released, that'll do more to damage Trump's support with his base than these investigations. Evangelicals hate sex and hookers and stuff.
 
birdman said:
How much would it have cost Trump to hire his own hackers, I mean IT specialists, to break into the DNC and Hillary's emails to steal, I mean retrieve, all that data? Does that make it valuable?
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The emails clearly have value. And that would be the government theory in any charges under that statute according to the facts we currently have.

It's a plausible reading but I think the better one is that the statute intended to prevent foreign money going to candidates. "Any other thing of value" read in that context would apply to property that could be converted into cash, not information.
 
All this arguing about whether "dirt" has "value" under this particular statute is pointless. Mueller is empowered to investigate all aspects of the relationship between Trump's campaign and Russia, and anything else he comes across in the course of that investigation. Trump supporters are desperately trying to spin the situation with this legal smokescreen - it's all over the conservative media opinion pages from all their "legal analysts". The point here is not to prove that no crime was committed - nobody can possibly know that at this time. The point is to throw shade on the special counsel and build up political and popular support for when Trump makes his move to fire Mueller.
 
Deacon923 said:
All this arguing about whether "dirt" has "value" under this particular statute is pointless. Mueller is empowered to investigate all aspects of the relationship between Trump's campaign and Russia, and anything else he comes across in the course of that investigation. Trump supporters are desperately trying to spin the situation with this legal smokescreen - it's all over the conservative media opinion pages from all their "legal analysts". The point here is not to prove that no crime was committed - nobody can possibly know that at this time. The point is to throw shade on the special counsel and build up political and popular support for when Trump makes his move to fire Mueller.
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TITCR
 
Deacon923 said:
All this arguing about whether "dirt" has "value" under this particular statute is pointless. Mueller is empowered to investigate all aspects of the relationship between Trump's campaign and Russia, and anything else he comes across in the course of that investigation. Trump supporters are desperately trying to spin the situation with this legal smokescreen - it's all over the conservative media opinion pages from all their "legal analysts". The point here is not to prove that no crime was committed - nobody can possibly know that at this time. The point is to throw shade on the special counsel and build up political and popular support for when Trump makes his move to fire Mueller.
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His former property in Toronto got over $100M from Putin's VEB. This is not in dispute. Nor is Trump's funding of his Soho property by Felix Sater's dirty money.
 
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