Reset Password
Reset Link Sent
| Blogs > redmustang91 > Wild Red Mustang thoughts! |
Collusion with Russia during the election campaign is a crime
|
Collusion with Russia during the election campaign is a crime If the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the election campaign, they probably violated numerous Federal laws. Right wing commentators have claimed any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was not illegal. Fox's Geraldo Rivera first brought it up in mid-May: "What is the crime?" Rivera said May 10 on Sean Hannity's show. "If the Russian KGB chief is talking to Paul Manafort and the chief says, 'You know, I've got this dirt here that says Hillary Clinton was this or that,' and Paul Manafort says, 'Next Wednesday, why don't you release that, that'd be great for us.' That’s not — I don't know that that's a crime at all. What's the crime?" Right-wing columnist Ronald Kessler went further on May 21. "There's no violation of law if, in fact, the campaign colluded with Russia, whatever that means," he told CNN's Fareed Zakaria. Fox News' Gregg Jarrett seemed to agree. "Collusion is not a crime," he told Fox News’ Happening Now on May 30, echoing an op-ed he wrote in which he argued that "colluding with Russia is not, under America’s criminal codes, a crime.” "Only in antitrust law," Jarrett said. "You can collude all you want with a foreign government in an election. There’s no such statute." "Collusion is not breaking the law," conservative writer Michael Reagan, the of former President Ronald Reagan, told CNN's Don Lemon on May 31. Former White House counsel Robert Bauer, now a partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie, said the view that collusion with Russia would not be a crime is "flawed." "It fails to consider the potential campaign finance violations, as suggested by the facts so far known, under existing law," Bauer wrote on Just Security earlier this month. "These violations are criminally enforceable." Bauer pointed to a campaign finance law that prohibits foreign nationals from providing "anything of value … in connection with" an election. "The hacking of the Podesta emails, which were then transmitted to Wikileaks for posting, clearly had value," Bauer noted, pointing to Trump's frequent praise of the organization. "And its connection to the election is not disputed." Josh Douglas, an election and constitutional law<b> expert </font></b>who teaches at the University of Kentucky Law School, also cited campaign finance laws — specifically, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, also known as the McCain-Feingold act — when asked whether collusion with a foreign power to win an election was illegal. Like Bauer, he said the question would be whether any of the Russian activity "would fall under that law as an expenditure," and whether the Americans involved — in this case, the Trump campaign — had a "specific intent to engage in that prohibited act." To Bauer, the intent seems clear: "The President and others associated with the campaign made no bones about the value to them of the purloined email communications. ... He drew on the emails in the debates with Secretary Clinton. Notably, when he was asked during the debates to acknowledge the Russian program of interference and given the opportunity to openly oppose the actions, he wouldn’t do so. He also mentioned Wikileaks 124 times in the last month of the campaign. The Russians could only have been strengthened in the conviction that their efforts were welcome and had value. That covers the evidence in plain sight." James Gardner, an election law<b> expert </font></b>at SUNY Buffalo Law School, said the answer to whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia "depends on what specific actions formed the basis of collusion." Political historian Allan Lichtman agreed, saying indictments and prosecutions would depend upon the particular circumstances of a case and interpretations of the law that are not always clear. Both Lichtman and Gardner said the federal statute criminalizing treason could apply. Aside from treason, "numerous laws" could be implicated by collusion with any foreign government, Lichtman said. Those include the Logan Act, which forbids dealings by private individuals with foreign governments involved in disputes with the US; the Stored Communications Act, which creates Fourth Amendment-like privacy protections for email and other digital communications; and the Espionage Act. John Coates, an election law<b> expert </font></b>at Harvard University Law School, pointed to relevant federal statutes that could apply, including at least two federal statutes governing campaign contributions and donations by foreign nationals and two governing fraud and conspiracy offenses. Andy Wright, a professor of constitutional law at Savannah Law School, said that if Americans entered into an agreement to assist illegal Russian influence operations, "it could create a conspiracy which is a federal crime." Wright said, American citizens colluding with a foreign power to illegally affect an election "could constitute aiding and abetting that foreign power’s criminal campaign finance violation." The idea that collusion is inherently legal, moreover, is "absurd," said Mark Kramer, the program director for the Project on Cold War Studies at Harvard's Davis Center for Eurasian Affairs. He added the form such collusion would have taken — hacking, a clandestine transfer of funds, conspiracy — would be serious crimes on their own. |
Become a member to create a blog
