Mark Penn, The Former Pollster For Both Bill Clinton And Hillary Clinton, Has Penned An Op-ed In The Hill Wednesday In Which He Argues That Michael Cohen’s Guilty Plea Shows The Double Standard That Prosecutors Have Applied Unfairly To Donald Trump.
Penn argues that while what Trump is alleged to have done — paying Stormy Daniels for a non-disclosure agreement she had sought for five years prior to the election — was legal, Hillary Clinton failed to report campaign expenditures that led to the Steele dossier.
He writes: The usual procedures here would be for the FEC to investigate complaints and sort through these murky laws to determine if these kinds of payments are personal in nature or more properly classified as campaign expenditures. And, on the Daniels payment that was made and reimbursed by Trump, it is again a question of whether that was made for personal reasons (especially since they have been trying since 2011 to obtain agreement). Just because it would be helpful to the campaign does not convert it to a campaign expenditure. Think of a candidate with bad teeth who had dental work done to look better for the campaign; his campaign still could not pay for it because it’s a personal expenditure.
Contrast what is going on here with the treatment of the millions of dollars paid to a Democratic law firm which, in turn, paid out money to political research firm Fusion GPS and British ex-spy Christopher Steele without listing them on any campaign expenditure form — despite crystal-clear laws and regulations that the ultimate beneficiaries of the funds must be listed. This rule was even tightened recently. There is no question that hiring spies to do opposition research in Russia is a campaign expenditure, and yet, no prosecutorial raids have been sprung on the law firm, Fusion GPS or Steele. Reason: It does not “get” Trump. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]As conservative talk radio star Mark Levin made clear Tuesday, through an interview with a former Federal Elections Commission chairman, the Cohen plea bargain is not exactly the slam dunk against Trump that it’s being portrayed by the mainstream media.
And it wasn’t just Levin. Bradley Smith, a Clinton-appointed member of FEC from 2000 to 2005 and its chairman in 2004, agreed.
Early in the interview with Levin, in response to a hypothetical situation Levin described, Bradley said a payment such as the one involving Cohen, which related to behavior that took place prior to a potential candidate’s political campaign, “should not be” considered a campaign violation
In the interview, Smith — the former chairman of the FEC, remember — makes the point over and over again that just the fact that an expenditure might help a candidate’s public image does not make every penny a candidate spends a matter of campaign finance law. – READ MORE
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