Hillary campaign in hot water with FEC over lies about paying for fake Trump dossier

I speculated the other night that Hillary had probably created enough plausible deniability that she could personally escape legal jeopardy for her role in paying for the fake Trump dossier. Maybe I gave her too much credit for being a clever criminal. Hillary's campaign tried to get reporting this expense by paying the law firm Perkins Coie for vaguely defined "legal services," only to have Perkins Coie turn around and hire Fusion GPS to dig up (or in some cases, it appears, make up) dirt on Donald Trump. This was supposed to serve as the arm's-length separation that would allow Hillary to claim she had nothing to do with it.

But FEC rules don't allow for that. You can't just report that you paid for legal services. You have to detail in your report what the services were for. Hillary's report didn't do that, and her campaign staff have been telling the media ever since BuzzFeed released the dossier that they had nothing to do with it. We now know that was a lie, and an organization called the Campaign Legal Center has filed a complaint with the FEC over the apparent deceit:

Mark Elias, lawyer for the Clinton campaign, reportedly paid the Washington-based research firm Fusion GPS to continue compiling a “dossier” on the Republican then-candidate — and failed to disclose the payments, the complaint says. Campaign Legal Center, the nonprofit that filed the documents with the FEC, claims this is a direct violation of campaign finance law, which requires campaign and party committees to report all their spending. “The DNC and Hillary for America reported dozens of payments totaling millions of dollars to the law firm Perkins Coie with the purpose described as ‘Legal Services’ or ‘Legal and Compliance Consulting,’ when in reality, at least some of those payments were earmarked for the firm Fusion GPS, with the purpose of conducting opposition research on Donald Trump,” the complaint says. “By failing to file accurate reports, the DNC and Hillary for America undermined the vital public information role that reporting is intended to serve.” According to FEC records, the Clinton campaign and DNC reported a total of 382 payments to Perkins Coie throughout the election cycle.

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While it’s legal to pay a company to do opposition research, it’s against the law to hide the true purpose. “By filing misleading reports, the DNC and Clinton campaign undermined the vital public information role of campaign disclosures,” Adav Noti, senior director of trial litigation and strategy at CLC and a former FEC official, explained in a statement.

This is about as Clintonian as it gets. The woman has been lying and covering it up all her life, and I'm sure she believes there's no one better than she at creating a path strewn with so much confusion and ambiguity that it's impossible to nail her for what she obviously did. But maybe she's not as good as she thought she was. Strictly in terms of public knowledge, it's now clear to everyone paying attention that Hillary was trying to buy dirt on Trump without a paper trail to show she was doing it. (The fact that Christopher Steele's sources were from the Kremlin puts a whole new spin on the "collusion with Russia" thing, and that's another post all its own.) Is Hillary going to escape legal culpability for lying on her FEC report like she escaped it for her e-mail felonies? She doesn't have Loretta Lynch and James Comey around to protect her anymore, and no one has to worry about the precedent they'd set by coming down legally on a current presidential nominee. And the statute is not ambiguous. If Hillary for America didn't disclose that they were paying Perkins Coie to hire Fusion GPS, then they lied and they're in noncompliance with the statute. Now, the penalty is only a fine, so we can't get any satisfaction from chanting "lock her up." (Then again, the FBI could still re-open the e-mail investigation and in my mind it absolutely should.) But if the FEC does fine Hillary's campaign for this, it will represent a rare legal sanction for her lying and dirty tricks. I suppose it has little real-life effect with her political career over, but it would do a great deal of harm to the media narrative of "Russia collusion," not to mention the narrative of Hillary's entire career. Almost anything that happens to Hillary is too lenient, but I'm not fussy. The woman has been on a 40-year crime spree and escaped any penalty by wielding influence with the people who could hold her to account but are unwilling to do so. Anything that makes it official Hillary broke the law works for me.