Ex-FEC Chair Indicates Trump Using Own Money to Pa
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Liberals across the nation are squirming in their seats with glee at the latest news that President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, struck a plea deal with prosecutors that involved violating campaign finance laws related to a payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Not so fast.
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.
Cohen agreed to plead guilty to eight criminal counts of tax evasion (five counts), making a false statement to a financial institution (one count), and campaign finance violations (two counts), according to The Wall Street Journal.
It’s the campaign finance charges that have liberals going bananas. But Cohen only pleaded to them, Levin said, to avoid prosecution on even more charges.
“Prosecutors and Cohen cut a deal. It’s a plea bargain,” Levin said, according to Conservative Review. “It’s not a precedent. … They obviously had more on Michael Cohen, or Michael Cohen wouldn’t have cut a deal.”
More to the point, Levin said, Cohen’s guilty plea to campaign finance charges don’t mean there was an actual violation of the law.
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.
The whole interview is worth listening to, but the heart of Levin’s questioning comes about the 2:45 mark.
https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/fec-chair-t...tyalliance
Michael Cohen plead guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that are not a crime. President Obama had a big campaign finance violation and it was easily settled!