So now we have our answer: There won’t be any charges against Hillary Clinton or anyone else in the ’email server scandal’ which has played such a huge role to date in the 2016 election. It is important to understand what James Comey said. The relevant statutes are broad enough that lots of people could conceivably be charged under them. And there are occasional cases where prosecutors do use that expansive nature to charge people they really have no business charging. But, as Comey said, “no reasonable prosecutor would bring” charges in this case.
What is most notable about this news from a political and news perspective is that this outcome was entirely predictable, indeed almost inevitable, based on the facts that were publicly known about the case.
So Tim Watts is my new best friend in the Australian federal parliament. MP Tim Watts. Needless to say, we’re pals now because he’s getting bombarded by the Trump campaign asking for money to fight ‘Crooked Hillary’. Among other things, Tim’s a Labor party member. So even apart from it being illegal for Trump to solicit funds from Tim (remember, Tim’s not an American citizen, being from Australia), their politics likely don’t line up. So as we’ve been researching Trump’s top foreign countries for fundraising, I’ve been curious whether the Trump campaign has now taken the actually quite simple steps required to purge its list of at least foreign government officials at their government email addresses.
The answer is: no. As recently as last night (US time) Tim was getting emails from Trump begging for more money ahead of the critical June FEC deadline – which we discussed yesterday.
But here’s where things got significantly weirder.
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I still can’t quite believe that even as big a huckster as Donald Trump thinks he can get away with this. But it’s starting to seem like Trump was probably lying when he announced with great fanfare a week ago that he was converting some $50 million of loans to his campaign into simple contributions. This would mean that he could no longer use future contributions to pay himself back for those loans. In other words, he couldn’t have either small donors or GOP fat cats reimburse him for his “self-funded” primary campaign.
This news comes from Ari Melber and Alexandre Jaffe at NBC News. Back on June 23rd, on the heels of the Trump campaign’s catastrophic and humiliating May FEC report, he grandly announced that he was forgiving the debt and that he would file the relevant paperwork with the FEC that day.
But that apparently never happened. The FEC has no record of such a filing.
I’m curious why we’re not hearing more about this. On the terrorist/jihadist web, ISIS fighters and supporters seem downright giddy for a Trump presidency, a mockable clown who will tank the US economy and draw the US into the land war they’re hoping for.
TPM Reader BM has a theory that is at first glance ridiculous. In fact, on second glance it is also ridiculous. But when it comes to trying to figure out why Donald Trump is asking legislators in Denmark, Iceland and Australia to send him political contributions, I’m really not sure it’s more ridiculous than the other theories. Here’s BM …
I have a purely speculative alternate hypothesis for how this train wreck of funding solicitations to foreign legislatures came about.
First, posit that DJT and the rest of his clan have now, and/or have had in the past, business interests in the UK (golf courses), Iceland (google “FL Group”), Australia, Canada, etc.
“It has been a whole campaign about us without us,” says Linda Sarsour, a community organizer and executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. The quotesis from this piece from this morning by TPM’s Lauren Fox, looking at the mix of fear and mobilization in America’s Muslim community in the year of Trump. It’s a powerful piece. Give it a read.
FEC complaint filed against Trump for soliciting campaign contributions from foreign MPs in the UK, Iceland, Australia, Denmark, Canada and sundry other global democracies.
Yesterday, Caitlin MacNeal reported that Donald Trump had been bombarding MPs from the United Kingdom with fundraising emails asking for money to fund his campaign against “Crooked Hillary.” Then last night I reported that Trump and his sons have been upping the ante and sending emails to every member of the parliament of Iceland also asking for money.
“I have no idea why he emailed me the letter,” said MP Guðlaugur Þór Þórðarson, a member of Independence Party. “This whole matter is very perplexing. The letter left me speechless,” said MP Katrín Jakobsdóttir, head of the Left Green Party. If you’re wondering if this is as bizarre as it sounds, Yes, it totally is. Trump and his wastrel sons appear to be developing a new composite literary form – the hybrid campaign money ask/Nigerian email scam email. ‘Dearly Beloved in Christ, I am former billionaire Donald Trump, now fighting to regain my fortune from Crooked Hillary …” But once I posted about Iceland, the floodgates truly opened. Those weren’t the only countries.
We just announced this morning on Morning Joe that today we’re introducing the 2016 version of PollTracker mobile. This year it’s available on both iOS and Android. And of course it’s free.
As you may know, TPM runs PollTracker, the most accurate poll aggregator in the business (yep, check out the 2012 final results). There are other poll aggregators out there. But PollTracker is the only one with a mobile app that sends you live notifications every time a new poll is released in a contest you’re following. Maybe you shouldn’t be so addicted to politics and polls that you can’t wait to find out in the evening or when you’re back from lunch or tomorrow morning which new polls came out. But if you’re a politics junkie it’s not soon enough. You need to know now. That’s the magic of PollTracker. Do you absolutely need to know when there’s a new poll out of the Ohio Senate race? New Hampshire? Trump v Clinton in Florida. Download PollTracker Mobile, ‘follow’ the races you’re most interested in and you’ll get a notification on your smartphone every time a new poll is released.
