June, 14 2019, 12:00am EDT
Free Speech For People Sues FEC Over Trump Campaign's Hush Money Payment
The lawsuit charges the Federal Election Commission with failing to investigate Trump and his campaign’s role in buying former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal’s silence about her alleged affair with the president, in violation of campaign finance law
WASHINGTON
Free Speech For People, a nonpartisan nonprofit legal advocacy organization, filed a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission on Thursday for failing to investigate a $150,000 "hush money" payment made in 2016 to Karen McDougal, one of President Trump's former mistresses, as a potential violation of federal campaign finance law.
The lawsuit challenges the Federal Election Commission's failure to act on a February 2018 administrative complaint from Free Speech For People. The complaint, amended in April and July 2018, presented evidence that President Trump, his campaign, and his personal lawyer and campaign operative Michael Cohen arranged for American Media Inc. (the publisher of the National Enquirer) to pay $150,000 to buy McDougal's story and prevent its publication during the 2016 election. The law provides that if the FEC has not resolved a complaint within 120 days of filing, the complaining party may challenge that delay in federal court. Federal prosecutors have concluded proceedings against Cohen, who pleaded guilty, and American Media, which entered into a non-prosecution agreement, for violating the Federal Election Campaign Act.
"The Federal Election Commission needs to do its job," said Jessica Kim, an attorney at Cohen Milstein representing Free Speech for People in their case against the FEC. "That includes addressing violations of federal campaign finance law by candidates or their campaigns in a timely and thorough manner."
Questions remain about the exact role and liability of the Trump campaign and President Trump himself in the McDougal case. Cohen testified in court and in later congressional testimony that he arranged the McDougal hush money "at the direction of, and in coordination with" Trump. But Trump and his team have consistently denied Trump's involvement in the McDougal payoff and have publicly accused Cohen of lying in exchange for leniency from prosecutors. House Oversight Committee ranking member Jim Jordan and Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows even asked Attorney General William Barr to investigate Cohen for perjury.
In contrast to the Department of Justice, which has adopted a policy against prosecuting sitting presidents, the FEC has the capacity to bring civil charges against a sitting president for campaign finance law violations. The FEC can also bring charges against a president's campaign committee. Most recently, the FEC fined the Obama campaign $375,000 for accepting excessive contributions and failing to name donors in the final weeks of the 2008 election.
According to the lawsuit, "an FEC investigation is essential to clarifying the nature of Mr. Trump's and/or the Trump campaign's involvement."
"It's unlikely prosecutors would pursue a case against Trump after Mueller declined to charge the President with a crime," said Ron Fein, Legal Director for Free Speech For People. "But an investigation by the FEC is not subject to the same limits. The American people deserve to learn the truth about what happened in the 2016 election, and since neither prosecutors nor Congress seem inclined to dig any further into the hush money payoff, the FEC needs to do its job."
Free Speech For People is a national non-partisan non-profit organization founded on the day of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC that works to defend our democracy and our Constitution.
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The letter writers, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), argue that "such a policy would provide clear directives for the military to follow: A president could order a nuclear launch only if (1) Congress had approved the decision, providing a constitutional check on executive power or (2) the United States had already been attacked with a nuclear weapon. This would be infinitely safer than our current doctrine."
The two write that time is of the essence: "As Donald Trump prepares to return to the Oval Office, it is more important than ever to take the power to start a nuclear war out of the hands of a single individual and ensure that Congress's constitutional role is respected and fulfilled."
The Constitution vests Congress, not the president, with the power to declare war (though presidents have used military force without getting the OK from Congress on multiple occasions in modern history, according to the National Constitution Center).
During the Cold War, when nuclear weapons policy was produced, speed was seen as essential to deterrence, according to Jon Wolfsthal, the director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists, who wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post last year that makes a similar argument to Markey and Lieu.
"There is no reason today to rely on speedy decision-making during situations in which the United States might launch first. Even as relations with Moscow are at historic lows, we are worlds removed from the Cold War's dominant knife's-edge logic," he wrote.
While nuclear tensions today may not be quite as high as they were during the apex of the Cold War, fears of nuclear confrontation have been heightened due to poor relations between the United States and Russia over the ongoing war in Ukraine, among other issues. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree lowering the threshold for potential nuclear weapons use not long after the U.S. greenlit Ukraine's use of U.S.-supplied long range weapons in its fight against Russia.
This is not the first time Markey and Lieu have pushed for greater guardrails on nuclear first-use. The two are the authors of the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, a proposed bill first introduced in 2017 that would bar a U.S. president from launching a nuclear first strike without the consent of Congress.
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In their letter, Markey and Lieu also recount an episode from the first Trump presidency when, shortly after the January 6 insurrection, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley ordered his staff to come to him if they received a nuclear strike order from Trump.
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On October 16, Israel bombed the Nabatieh municipal complex, killing Mayor Ahmad Khalil and 10 other people.
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Survivor Jinane Hijazi told Amnesty: "I've lost everything; my entire family, my parents, my siblings, my daughter. I wish I had died that day too."
As the report notes:
A fragment of the munition found at the site of the attack was analyzed by an Amnesty International weapons expert and based upon its size, shape, and the scalloped edges of the heavy metal casing, identified as most likely a MK-80 series aerial bomb, which would mean it was at least a 500-pound bomb. The United States is the primary supplier of these types of munitions to Israel.
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Guevara Rosas said: "These attacks must be investigated as war crimes. The Lebanese government must urgently call for a special session at the U.N. Human Rights Council to establish an independent investigative mechanism into the alleged violations and crimes committed by all parties in this conflict. It must also grant the International Criminal Court jurisdiction over Rome Statute crimes committed on Lebanese territory."
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Echoing recent warnings from economists, business leaders, news reporting, and immigrant rights groups, Democrats on the congressional Joint Economic Committee detailed Thursday how President-elect Donald Trump's planned mass deportations "would deliver a catastrophic blow to the U.S. economy."
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Citing recent research by the American Immigration Council and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the JEC report warns that depending on how many immigrants are forced out of the country, Trump's deportations could:
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Along with laying out the economic toll of Trump's promised deportations, the JEC report makes the case that "providing a pathway to citizenship is good economics. Immigrants are helping meet labor demand while also demonstrating that more legal pathways to working in the United States are needed to meet this demand."
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The JEC report followed a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday that explored how mass deportations would not only devastate the U.S. economy but also harm the armed forces and tear apart American families.
In a statement, Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the advocacy group America's Voice, thanked Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) "for calling this important discussion together and shining a spotlight on the potential damage."
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