(National Sentinel) Criminal Conduct: The Federal Election Commission has received a complaint against the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee for alleged violations of campaign finance laws over their funding of the infamous “Trump dossier,” the Washington Times reports.
The complaint was filed by the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, the paper noted. It says that Democrats effectively hid the payments from public scrutiny, which is a violation of federal law.
Election statutes say that the committees of political campaigns and parties have to disclose their reasons for spending money and who receives it.
“By filing misleading reports, the DNC and Clinton campaign undermined the vital public information role of campaign disclosures,” said Adav Noti, senior director of trial litigation and strategy at CLC and a former FEC official. “Voters need campaign disclosure laws to be enforced so they can hold candidates accountable for how they raise and spend money. The FEC must investigate this apparent violation and take appropriate action.”
On Tuesday media reporting claimed that a lawyer for the Clinton campaign, Marc
Elias, hired political opposition firm Fusion GPS, which in turn hired a former British spy, Christopher Steele, to investigation then-GOP presidential candidate Donald J. Trump in April 2016.
Steele, who has ties to the FBI, conducted the opposition research, eventually compiling a 35-page dossier alleging salacious things and that Trump had improper ties to Russia. The Clinton campaign and the DNC funded the researc until the end of October last year, just days before the Nov. 8 election.
“Questions about who paid for this dossier are the subject of intense public interest, and this is precisely the information that FEC reports are supposed to provide,” said Brendan Fischer, director of federal and FEC reform at CLC.
“Payments by a campaign or party committee to an opposition research firm are legal, as long as those payments are accurately disclosed. But describing payments for opposition research as ‘legal services’ is entirely misleading and subverts the reporting requirements,” he added.
Democrats and Left-leaning media outlets are defending Clinton and the DNC, claiming that the real issue isn’t who funded the dossier but rather the information it contains, though most of it has never been substantiated.
There are also questions about whether the Clinton campaign and the DNC broke laws in funding a foreign national to conduct activities related to a U.S. election.
“…[U]sing the very standards Democrats have constructed over the past year, the Fusion GPS story is now the most tangible evidence we possess of Russian interference in the American election,” writes David Harsanyi at the New York Post.
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