Donald Trump’s campaign continues to solicit illegal foreign campaign contributions despite earlier warnings.
Esteemed Washington, D.C. newspaper The Hill reports that: “Donald Trump‘s campaign is still soliciting illegal donations from foreign individuals — including members of foreign governments at their official email addresses — weeks after the campaign was put on notice by watchdog groups.”
This report confirms the allegations made by WhoWhatWhy who reported last Friday that they had “been in contact with five foreign lawmakers, who have received at least seven different solicitations for contributions since the complaint was filed.”
“If they continue to do it after being informed, that would be an even more egregious violation,” Brendan Fischer, associate counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, told WhoWhatWhy. He noted that continued solicitations are further evidence of the Trump campaign’s recklessness and raises the likelihood that it knowingly violated the law.
As The Hill reports: “Foreign members of parliament from the United Kingdom and Australia confirmed to The Hill that they received fundraising solicitations from the Trump campaign as recently as July 12,” which is “two weeks after a widely publicized Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint issued on June 29 by nonpartisan watchdogs Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center.”
Terri Butler, a progressive Parliament member in Australia, told The Hill in a telephone interview Friday night that she was surprised to continue receiving fundraising solicitations from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s campaign at her official government email address.
Butler told The Hill she had no idea how the Trump campaign had acquired her government email, stating: “I haven’t signed up to any Trump lists.”
The same was true of Bob Blackman, a member of the U.K. House of Commons, who shared an email sent to his government email address from the Trump campaign on July 12.
“I did not sign up, these are sent unsolicited,” Blackman confirmed in an email sent to The Hill.
The Hill confirmed the same pattern with another member of U.K. Parliament, Peter Bottomly, who wrote that he had received three such solicitations for donations from the Trump campaign.
In an email to the The Hill, Bottomly explains that:
Neither [Trump’s] sons nor anyone else has answered my questions about how they acquired my email nor why they were asking for financial support that I suppose to be illegal for [Trump] to accept.
In a separate email sent to WhoWhatWhy, Bottomly wrote:
I replied to ask whether it is proper to solicit a donation from a person who is not a US voter, not a US resident, not a US taxpayer and who is a legislator in another jurisdiction.
As the Hill explains, “Federal law on foreign money in campaigns is black and white, campaign finance lawyers on both sides of the political divide say. It’s illegal for foreign individuals, corporations and governments to either give money directly to U.S. candidates or spend on advertising to influence U.S. elections.”
The Hill also notes that “it’s also illegal for candidates to solicit foreign money, regardless of whether the donations ever materialize.”
Timothy Kuhner, Associate Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law, told WhoWhatWhy that: “Burying your head in the sand is not a defense — to not know about these scandals as they unfold would represent a total failure of due diligence on behalf of the Trump campaign.”
Bradley Smith, Professor of Law at Capital University Law School, confirmed Kuhner’s assessment, telling WhoWhatWhy “Nothing makes it legal to solicit funds from a foreign national simply because the solicitation was inadvertent.”
Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, said he’s never observed a campaign continuing its efforts to solicit foreign cash after being put on public notice.
“This is kind of absurd. I don’t know of anyone else in this situation who would just go on keeping on soliciting money from foreign interests,” he said, noting his four-decade career. “I think the fact circumstances here are unprecedented.”
“If they are put on notice that their fundraising solicitations of potential foreign donors are illegal and they keep doing it, then you potentially have knowing and willful violations of the law, which moves this from civil violations to criminal violations,” Wertheimer concluded.
Wertheimer told The Hill that he would review this new information and may launch an additional complaint with the FEC – a criminal one this time.
Larry Noble, general counsel for Campaign Legal Center, said the Trump campaign’s foreign solicitations are “really outrageous.”
It is a serious violation of federal law to solicit political contributions from foreign nationals. There is no reason this should be happening. While U.S. citizens do live abroad, they usually don’t have foreign government email addresses or are members of parliament, so they can’t try to explain this by saying they thought they were soliciting U.S. citizens abroad.
If the Trump campaign has continued to solicit foreign nationals after the matter first came to light in June, this looks like either gross incompetence, gross negligence or willful conduct.
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