No, because they are interviewing the victims of the crime, the people involved are not offering information to them. IMHO, it would depend on where they got the tip, if they got the tip from a US citizen, no problem, if from a foreign national, I would think that it would require more scrutiny.
In any case, if they then held onto this information, rather than turning it over to the appropriate agencies, (I assume Florida’s labor dept.), then they are sitting on an, IMHO, ethical issue, if not a legal one. If they end up not using the info because the opponent drops out or offers another concession to keep the info private, then that’s blackmail, isn’t it?
Apologies, but I just said, “obstructing justice”, as in, preventing justice from being done, not “obstruction of justice”, the actual criminal act. As in, someone has committed a crime, and your actions are preventing law enforcement from investigating it, or even knowing that it exists. If there is a better term, I would be happy to use it.
Conspiracy to commit a crime isn’t protected speech is it?
I’m going to jump in, but Bricker can correct me if I’m wrong. Conspiracy requires some action, not just words. That is, you (or one of the conspirators) have to actually do something, not just say “I’m in”. So speech isn’t really the issue.
Even foreign nationals within the United States have First Amendment rights, especially strong in issues like this, where they are providing information about matters of public interest. I am very confident that any law that purported to prevent a tip from a foreign national would be held to run afoul of the First Amendment.
I decline the invitation to discuss the ethical concerns here, but I am very comfortable saying that there’s not a legal issue in sitting on the matter instead of reporting it.
Now, the exortion/blackmail question is a good one, but it also is not the law currently under discussion – the law about foreign nationals providing a “thing of value,” to aid a campaign is the issue I’d like to stick to, because the question you raise about blackmail is, believe it or not, a very hard question in law.
My apologies in turn. Maybe “hindering justice,” or “frustrating justice?” Something that draws a clearer distinction between the crime and the general concept?
Mine was a knee-jerk reaction. Sorry.
As a general rule, no, but since the reasoning in New York Times v. US means that this isn’t a crime to begin with, there cannot be a conspiracy to commit here.
In imagining this scenario, I would also imagine that there would be lawyers involved that would make a determination as to whether or not they should be talking to this foreign national.
In other words, if the situation were different from how it actually was, and was similar to the way you have described it, I do not think that the Clinton campaign would have used the information. If they did, they would make sure that there were lawyers present at ever step to ensure that they were not going outside the bounds of the law.
If a cop offers to sell me some crizzzunk, and I say “love it!” - that’s protected speech?
If a neighbor offers to hack my stupid son-in-law’s computer and get incriminating info, and I say, “love it!” - protected speech?
I’m just asking, here.
If I go to the meeting to get the drugs or the info - are my conversations at this meeting protected by the first amendment?
If a foreign government offers me assistance, and, in violation of the law against accepting assistance from foreign governments, I say, “Love it!” and attend a meeting to acquire the assistance - does the first amendment mean that I haven’t broken the law forbidding me to accept assistance from a foreign government?
Laughable - unless, of course, Hillary did something superficially similar but completely unreleated, in which case, she’s guilty, obvs, but the Republican is totes off the hook.
“The Clinton campaign would have been more cautious” is a pretty meaningless assertion. If Trump jr’s meeting was legal then who cares about the lack of caution wrt criminality?
I don’t know that it has been established that Jr.'s meeting was legal. I’ve seen enough arguments in that direction to make me less certain that it was illegal, but I have seen compelling arguments in the other as well.
I was just responding to Bricker’s hypothetical of “What if Clinton did the same thing?” with the answer of, “If it were illegal, or questionable enough whether it would be illegal, then she probably wouldn’t have done it (And if she did do it, she would have been much much better at hiding the evidence.), and not even through superior ethics, but simply through a superior understanding of the law.”
I’m quite confident that Clinton’s campaign had a generally superior understanding of the law (notwithstanding that Trump’s lawyers are “the best” :rolleyes: ) but I’m equally confident that no one in Clinton’s campaign would have hesitated to accept Machado’s help, or the help of those hypothetical undocumented workers, because such information is manifestly within the First Amendment’s strongest area of protection: politically relevant speech about areas of public concern.
And again, whether the info was stolen or not has zero relevance to the law prohibiting foreign assistance to campaigns. The issue of the info being stolen might be relevant to some other criminal violation, of course, but not to the restrictions in 11 CFR § 110.20.
Defenders of the Trump Administration are having a difficult time with this latest Don Jr. revelation. The search for some action by a Democratic candidate or campaign that is even vaguely analogous to the Goldstone/request to “schedule a meeting with you [Don Jr.] and the Russian government attorney”/“information that would incriminate Hillary and …would be very useful to your father” affair is not going well.
No one has yet come up with a reasonable parallel. (Machado was a US citizen and was reporting legally-obtained information; the Ukrainian information sought by the DNC was the product of an official investigation*, not the product of espionage or hacking, etc.)
All anyone can do is pick out isolated elements and attack them, as with the discussion on the First Amendment (a part of which is quoted at the top of this post). Of course that’s what lawyers do when there is no good case to be made–pick around the edges–but the resulting collection of nits fails to be convincing.
The First Amendment diversion seems particularly weak. There are legal consequences, after all, outside of First Amendment considerations, to “exchanging information about items of political interest” when that information was illegally obtained, as opposed to information that is (for example) a part of the public record. The uttering of the words may be protected but the actions involved in obtaining the information put into words may not be. From the evidence of his emails, Don Jr. appears to have been hoping to receive and make use of illegally-obtained information**. There are dozens of federal conspiracy statues and I don’t pretend to be expert on them–but who would bet against the likelihood that one of them will be found to be applicable?
**That’s an inference, but not a particularly wild one: if the information Goldstone was promising was coming from the Russian government (“the crown prosecutor of Russia …offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents” which “is obviously very high level and sensitive information” and “is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump”) then it was unlikely to be something found in records available to the public. Full text of the emails between Donald Trump Jr and Rob Goldstone | Donald Trump | The Guardian
Sure. I’m discussing only § 110.20. I’d be happy to analyze any other statute you believe to be in play here, but let’s not mix them up. I am absolutely confident that the prohibition relating to “thing of value” in § 110.20 cannot be interpreted as applying to foreign information provided on matters of political interest without running squarely into the First Amendment.
Should we do another thread or another post in this thread to discuss “receive and make use of illegally-obtained material?”
That’s not quite what I mean because it’s not a hypothetical. It’s something that was actually done. My questions was, does that put to rest the notion that Clinton would not do such a thing or is this particular thing in some way different from the other hypotheticals?
I’ll leave it to lawyer types to answer but that situation might be complicated by the fact that DREAMERS have spent their entire adult life and reside in the States plus were eligible for a promised path to permanent residency.
Well, it’s manifestly using campaign assistance from non-citizens, who are providing a “thing of value” to the campaign. I’d say (initially) that it fits. But I welcome other sets of eyes.
Just to be clear, I’m talking about the legality of the issue, not the ethical part. The folks in question are foreign nationals, no matter what their dreams might be. If the statute in question has an exemption for “dreamers”, maybe someone can point us to it.
OK, that’s what I was thinking. But it’s always good to have a legal expert’s opinion on the matter.
This seems like an odd inference. Donald Jr. was, ostensibly, offered information from a senior Russian official, as part of a Russian government effort, involving Clinton’s “dealings” with Russia. I don’t think I would conclude that the information itself was obtained illegally. It sounds like it is coming directly from one of the parties (indeed, that seems like a pretty big part of the problem). I’m not sure I see a distinction between information provided at the request of the Russian “Crown Prosecutor” and information provided by “an independent Ukrainian government agency.”
If your point is that obtaining the information by Donald Jr. was illegal (presumably because it violated the contribution law), then see generally the thread.
