Tweet Share Share Comment As more and more legal bills come due for the former president, you may be wondering: What do campaign finance rules have to say about which money trees Donald Trump is allowed to shake in order to pay what he owes? On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick turned to election-law whisperer University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Rick Hasen for answers. This excerpt of their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
To listen to the full episode of Amicus, join Slate Plus.
Dahlia Lithwick: There are a lot of campaign finance questions that are swirling in the news that seem kind of Hasen-worthy. Part of that is, can Lara Trump drain the RNC coffers to pay off her father-in-law’s massive judgments after a pair of big losses in Manhattan? There’s the Stormy Daniels lawsuit, which is, at heart, a campaign finance case. I wonder if you just have some thoughts about where we are in this moment. We’re talking about all these things as unrelated, but in some sense it’s all related to “if campaign finance laws worked as intended, this stuff wouldn’t be so thorny and intractable and awful.”
Rick Hasen: It should be a no-brainer that a political party cannot pay the restitution that is owed by a person for committing business fraud. The whole point of disgorging profits is that you’re taking the ill-gotten gains away from the wrongdoer.
Remember the E. Jean Carroll case? It was, I think, over $60 million in punitive damages? The whole point of punitive damages is to punish the wrongdoer. Well, if someone else is paying, you’re not punishing the wrongdoer. I don’t think they’re actually gonna try to pay these things out of the RNCs coffers or even out of the PAC.
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I think they’re gonna keep paying the legal expenses out [of the PAC]. Now, legal expenses, you know, what could they be? $3 million, $4 million? It’s $50 million in legal fees.
Alina Habba. She’s not cheap.
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Well, Trump is doing for the defense bar what he did for the Washington Post while he was president.
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The money is just rolling in because of the outrageous conduct, but there you go. We don’t have real-time campaign finance enforcement. I think that’s the important point. If this turns out to be a campaign finance violation, when will we find that out? Two or three years at the Federal Election Commission where they’re completely deadlocked on party lines or a criminal case brought by the Department of Justice—when, in three years? Merrick Garland doesn’t seem to move all that quickly when it comes to Trump. That’s part of the reason we’re in the situation we are right now with this race against the clock.
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So even if there are campaign finance violations, even if they try and do some outrageous things, it’s not like someone can run into court, get an injunction, and say, “Stop allowing Trump to pay the money.” That’s just not how it works in that area. The Stormy Daniels payments was, what, 2016 and that’s what’s now going on trial potentially at the end of March.
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Right. That’s the template for how utterly unenforceable this is in real time. Only now are you going to get to hear hours of Michael Cohen saying, “Oh yeah, no, we broke all the laws.” Quite a lag time.
The federal government never brought that suit, remember? This is being brought in state court and I’m quite skeptical. I wrote a piece in Slate years ago saying the federal government should bring this case, and then they didn’t. And I said the state government shouldn’t bring this case. And of course they did. So, you know, who’s listening to me?
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Read More But the problem with the state case is that to turn a misdemeanor into a felony here, you’ve gotta show some underlying crime. And if the underlying crime is violating federal campaign finance law, it’s not clear under New York law that you could do that kind of bootstrapping.
I’m not a fan of that case. Big fan of the election subversion case in D.C., but not of this one.
Huge fan of the Mar-a-Lago case, which our great-grandchildren will enjoy covering very much.
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26.02.2024
Tweet Share Share Comment As more and more legal bills come due for the former president, you may be wondering: What do campaign finance rules have to say about which money trees Donald Trump is allowed to shake in order to pay what he owes? On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick turned to election-law whisperer University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Rick Hasen for answers. This excerpt of their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
To listen to the full episode of Amicus, join Slate Plus.
Dahlia Lithwick: There are a lot of campaign finance questions that are swirling in the news that seem kind of Hasen-worthy. Part of that is, can Lara Trump drain the RNC coffers to pay off her father-in-law’s massive judgments after a pair of big losses in Manhattan? There’s the Stormy Daniels lawsuit, which is, at heart, a campaign finance case. I wonder if you just have some thoughts about where we are in this moment. We’re talking about all these things as unrelated, but in some sense it’s all related to “if campaign finance laws worked as intended, this stuff wouldn’t be so thorny and intractable and awful.”
Rick Hasen: It should be........
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