re: They are going to go for campaign finance violations.

Trump had his own money to buy someone's silence and Cohen would have never lied about it if there was no investigation

witch hunt!

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Mueller is a true piece of shite.

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Yea another former federal prosecutor (again, can't remember who it was) said that it's interesting how all these things weren't passed off except to SDNY & it seems like things would boomerang right back to Mueller.

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This would be an idiotic hill to die on for them. I don't see it happening.

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The angle is: they are framing it that he was trying to influence the election by doing these payoffs, not sure the significance of that.

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yep. They missed a reporting deadline. 

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Uh, no. That was only a small portion of it, but nice try making it seem more innocent than it was. His fine was the largest of all time at $375,000.

The major sticking point for the FEC appeared to be a series of missing 48-hour notices for nearly 1,300 contributions totaling more than $1.8 million — an issue that lawyers familiar with the commission’s work say the FEC takes seriously. The notices must be filed on contributions of $1,000 or more that are received within the 20-day window of Election Day.

More than half of those contributions were transferred from the Obama Victory Fund,a joint committee between the campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Sources said the fine resulting from the settlement agreement has been paid, with $230,000 coming from the Obama campaign’s coffers and the remainder from the DNC.

The document outlined other violations, such as erroneous contribution dates on some campaign reports. The Obama campaign was also late returning some contributions that exceeded the legal limit.

Wait, I thought Mueller’s probe was on Russian Collusion? How does campaign finance fall under this umbrella?


Good gosh libs, always for the headlines - nothing of substance

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Wait, I thought Mueller’s probe was on Russian Collusion? How does campaign finance fall under this umbrella?

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This was based on a filing by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, since we’ve known for months that this was referred to them and not directly under Mueller’s investigation.

that is how Mueller is trying to avoid his investigation being called a witch hunt by giving this to another jurisdiction

but make no mistake this is what he wanted

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This is only the beginning

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Of democrats decent into obscurity. I agree.

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If campaign finance violations are themselves sufficient for impeachment, every member of Congress would be in trouble.

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I think this got passed off to the SDNY because it was only tangentially related to the investigation and likely minor overall.

The person that intrigues me is Flynn. The most troubling story that emerged from all of this was Flynn illegally working as a foreign agent on behalf of Erdogan, all while he was becoming a totalitarian.

But this and anything like it, seemed to be ignored by both sides, since he pleaded (or pled) guilty to lying to investigators. And apparently that plea involved a significant amount of cooperation and the legal fees have led to near financial ruin.

But if that was the only crime he committed, why would a really minor crime require such cooperation; what was the cooperation for; and why would it be so costly to defend?

Couldn’t it be that he was actually facing far more serious crimes (e.g., working as a foreign operative), and those crimes were part of something far more serious which required the costs and involvement to plea down to something minor? If true, that doesn’t mean Trump himself has any criminal involvement, but that would still mean that the investigation itself could be quite justified, regardless of who it actually implicates.