EyeSawYou

Liberal Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz on Wednesday took the wind out of the sails of those who hope Michael Cohen’s Tuesday plea deal with prosecutors will lead to President Trump’s impeachment or criminal implication.

“He is more correct than his critics are,” said Dershowitz on Wednesday’s edition of Fox News’ “Special Report With Bret Baier.” “It’s complicated. The law is clear that the president may contribute to his own campaign, so if the president had paid $280,000 to these two women, even if he had done so in order to help his campaign, that would be no problem, it would be legal. If Cohen himself made the contribution that would be unlawful because he has a limit of $5200.”

Dershowitz then described a “catch-22” prosecutors are in.

“If he believes Cohen that the president directed him to do it, then that’s not a crime at all. If he doesn’t believe Cohen, then Cohen has committed a crime and not the president — and the legal pundits have been saying if Cohen admits to a crime, that makes Trump an unindicted coconspirator — just wrong as a matter of basic criminal law. You don’t become an unindicted coconspirator if your action is lawful even though the action of the other person is unlawful.”

When asked why Cohen would plead guilty, Dershowitz said prosecutors had him “dead to rights” on tax crimes, and tacked the other charge as an “add on” to get him to talk about Trump.

“It’s not even a close question, that is so over-the-top,” Dershowitz said after Baier played a clip of Trump being accused of “high crime and misdemeanor.” “It is not a crime to contribute to your own campaign. If he had written a letter to these two women saying you’re going to hurt me in my campaign, I’m going to pay you $150,000 to help me get elected president and you have to keep it quiet, it’s hush money. No crime.”

“I challenge any of those who say it’s a crime to find me anything in the criminal law that would make it a crime for a president personally or candidate personally to pay in order to save his own e******n,” said Dershowitz. “It’s just not against the law. It may be a political sin, even if it determined the outcome of the e******n but the rule of law requires that when you say something is a crime, show me the statute.”

“Show me the statute,” he continued. “There is no statute that would make that a crime. It might be a misdemeanor for the campaign to fail to report that payment but it would be on the campaign not on the candidate. That’s not even a close question. To talk about this as a high crime and misdemeanor, it’s absurd. That’s not the kind of thing the framers had in mind.”

http://dailycaller.com/2018/08/22/dershowitz-trump-payment-not-illegal/

sb Loc: Florida's East Coast

The interesting thing will be when we see the source of the $130,000. As it is, it can be argued all day long whether it is a violation of campaign finance law. But if money for Cohen came from his campaign, then he is screwed.

Pegasus Loc: Texas Gulf Coast

Trump stated several times and it is known, that it was his money, not from the campaign. Of course, people are saying it was money that should have been reported as campaign expenditure. So, they are trying to get Trump either way. But the former head if the FEC said that the money should not have been reported as campaign expenditure.

It's a nothingburger to which Trump h**ers are clinging in desperation. It's very sad.

These are the same people who excused Clinton who raped women in the White House as just sex.

hj Loc: Florida

Yeah right. He is so smart he thinks he qualifies to run for president. HaHaHa.

hj Loc: Florida

Don't you love it when people on this forum know so much more than the legal scholars and they'll argue their point with their final breath even when proven wrong!

WNYShooter Loc: WNY

He self funded, so even if it did come from his campaign, it still came from him personally--which isn't a crime at all.

DaveO Loc: Northeast CT

Yeah, we hold your opinion above that of the experts who are being interviewed. Maybe someone will call you.

ole sarg Loc: south florida

It is if it was a payoff to effect an e******n. Read the lasw!

the guy is a creep

ole sarg Loc: south florida

Show me a law where it is illegal to get a BJ in the White House!

FOOL

WNYShooter Loc: WNY

Nobody said it was--except you that is.

Pegasus Loc: Texas Gulf Coast

You told us that you had no loyalty to anyone, ever. I would have expected that you would have some loyalty to yourself, but I was wrong. You have no problem to continually show you are an i***t.

Who here said that it was? I didn't and I don't remember reading about that from anyone here.

WNYShooter Loc: WNY

My wife, who is not only a lawyer, but as of this semester, also an Adjunct Law Professor, explained the law to me, what Trump did is in a grey area of the law, but not blatantly illegal. According to her, the prosecutor would need to prove clear intent to specifically skirt the law, and considering his negotiations actually began long before he announced his run for office, that would be primary proof that was not his intent. And BTW, my wife h**es Trump.

Pegasus Loc: Texas Gulf Coast

I would think that by now it would be apparent to everyone here that the laws are so murky that nobody seems to be able to say whether it's legal or not, at least to the satisfaction of everyone here. I think that tells you a lot about the case and the word "bogus" comes to mind.

I also think the laws are purposefully written to be vague so that it's up to the prosecutor to decide whether to indict or not. I mean, it's not like the laws about handling and safeguarding classified documents and being extremely careless (grossly negligent) about handling them on an industrial scale and then deciding that no prosecutor would ever indict and forgetting the whole thing. No, this is far more serious: Did Trump, who self-funded his campaign, use his money or his money to pay for a legal arrangement. And if he paid with his money, did he report it, whereas if he paid with his money, it should not have been his money.

mwalsh Loc: Houston

Yeah, but the back porch lawyers in the attic know so much more than those f**e news lawyers...

WNYShooter Loc: WNY

Even the former FEC commissioner says it wasn't, hard to get more expert than that:


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/those-payments-to-mistresses-were-unseemly-that-doesnt-mean-they-were-illegal/2018/08/22/634acdf4-a63b-11e8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.3ceb7b7c7e47&noredirect=on

"Those payments to women were unseemly. That doesn’t mean they were illegal."


Bradley Smith, a former chairman of the Federal E******n Commission, is chairman of the Institute for Free Speech and a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton.

If a candidate for public office decided to settle a private lawsuit to get it out of the news before E******n Day, would that be a campaign expenditure? If a business owner ran for political office and decided to pay bonuses to his employees, in the hope that he would get good press and boost his stock as a candidate, would that be a campaign expenditure, payable from campaign funds?

Under the theory that then-candidate Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen violated campaign finance laws by arranging hush-money payments to women accusing Trump of affairs, the answer would seem to be yes. We should probably think twice before accepting that answer.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York has extracted a guilty plea from Cohen for “knowingly and willfully” violating campaign finance laws by arranging for payments to two women accusing Trump of extramarital affairs. Cohen admitted he did so under the direction of “a candidate” — obviously referencing Trump — to “influence” an e******n. Cohen was facing multiple tax and fraud charges that could have landed him in jail for the rest of his life, even if he beat the campaign finance allegations. By pleading guilty, he limits his jail time to just a few years.

However, regardless of what Cohen agreed to in a plea bargain, hush-money payments to mistresses are not really campaign expenditures. It is true that “contribution” and “expenditure” are defined in the Federal E******n Campaign Act as anything “for the purpose of influencing any e******n,” and it may have been intended and hoped that paying hush money would serve that end. The problem is that almost anything a candidate does can be interpreted as intended to “influence an e******n,” from buying a good watch to make sure he gets to places on time, to getting a massage so that he feels fit for the campaign trail, to buying a new suit so that he looks good on a debate stage. Yet having campaign donors pay for personal luxuries — such as expensive watches, massages and Brooks Brothers suits — seems more like bribery than funding campaign speech.

That’s why another part of the statute defines “personal use” as any expenditure “used to fulfill any commitment, obligation, or expense of a person that would exist irrespective of the candidate’s e******n campaign.” These may not be paid with campaign funds, even though the candidate might benefit from the expenditure. Not every expense that might benefit a candidate is an obligation that exists solely because the person is a candidate.

Suppose, for example, that Trump had told his lawyers, “Look, these complaints about Trump University have no merit, but they embarrass me as a candidate. Get them settled.” Are the settlements thus “campaign expenses”? The obvious answer is no, even though the payments were intended to benefit Trump as a candidate.

If the opposite were true and they were considered campaign expenses, then not only could Trump pay them with campaign funds, but also he would be required to pay these business expenses from campaign funds. Is that what campaign donations are for?

But let’s go in that direction. Suppose Trump had used campaign funds to pay off these women. Does anyone much doubt that many of the same people now after Trump for using corporate funds, and not reporting them as campaign expenditures, would then be claiming that Trump had illegally diverted campaign funds to “personal use”? Or that federal prosecutors would not have sought a guilty plea from Cohen on that count? And that gets us to a troubling nub of campaign finance laws: Too often, you can get your target coming or going.

Yes, those payments were unseemly, but unseemliness doesn’t make something illegal. At the very least, the law is murky about whether paying hush money to a mistress is a “campaign expense” or a personal expense. In such circumstances, we would not usually expect prosecutors to charge the individuals with a “knowing and willful” violation, leading to criminal charges and possible jail time. A civil fine would be the normal response.

But Cohen is not the normal defendant, and prosecutors almost certainly squeezed him to plead guilty on these charges, in part, for the purpose of building a case for possible criminal or impeachment charges against the president, or even, daresay, “influencing the ree******n” of Trump.

Laws, once stretched from their limited language and proper purpose, are difficult to pound back into shape. We should proceed with caution here.