In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of my client, Alabama engineer Shaun McCutcheon, in his challenge to the Federal Election Commission's (FEC) outdated "aggregate limits," which effectively limited how many candidates any one donor could support.
Anti-speech liberals railed against McCutcheon's win, arguing it would create supersized "Joint Fundraising Committees" (JFCs). In court, they claimed these JFCs would allow a single donor to cut a multimillion-dollar check, and the JFC would then route funds through dozens of participating state parties, who would then funnel it back to the final recipient.
Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer claimed the Supreme Court's McCutcheon v. FEC ruling would lead to "the system of legalized bribery recreated that existed prior to Watergate." The Supreme Court, in ruling for us, flatly stated such a scheme would still be illegal.
The Democrats' response? Hold my beer.
The Committee to Defend the President has filed an FEC complaint against Hillary Clinton's campaign, Democratic National Committee (DNC), Democratic state parties and Democratic mega-donors.
As Fox News reported, we documented the Democratic establishment "us[ing] state chapters as straw men to circumvent campaign donation limits and launder(ing) the money back to her campaign." The 101-page complaint focused on the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) — the $500 million joint fundraising committee between the Clinton campaign, DNC, and dozens of state parties — which did exactly that the Supreme Court declared would still be illegal.
HVF solicited six-figure donations from major donors, including Calvin Klein and "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane, and routed them through state parties en route to the Clinton campaign. Roughly $84 million may have been laundered in what might be the single largest campaign finance scandal in U.S. history.
Here's what we know. Campaign finance law is incredibly complex and infamous for its lack of clarity. As I've explained before, its complexity is a feature, not a bug. Major political players with the resources to hire the very few attorneys who practice campaign finance law benefit from the complexity that keeps others out. Perhaps HVF's architects thought so too, and assumed that if no one understands what's happening, no one would complain.
Here's what you can do, legally. Per election, an individual donor can contribute $2,700 to any candidate, $10,000 to any state party committee, and (during the 2016 cycle) $33,400 to a national party's main account. These groups can all get together and take a single check from a donor for the sum of those contribution limits — it's legal because the donor cannot exceed the base limit for any one recipient. And state parties can make unlimited transfers to their national party.
Here's what you can't do, which the Clinton machine appeared to do anyway. As the Supreme Court made clear in McCutcheon v. FEC, the JFC may not solicit or accept contributions to circumvent base limits, through "earmarks" and "straw men" that are ultimately excessive — there are five separate prohibitions here.
On top of that, six-figure donations either never actually passed through state party accounts or were never actually under state party control, which adds false FEC reporting by HVF, state parties, and the DNC to the laundry list.
Finally, as Donna Brazile and others admitted, the DNC placed the funds under the Clinton campaign's direct control, a massive breach of campaign finance law that ties the conspiracy together.
Democratic donors, knowing the funds would end up with Clinton's campaign, wrote six-figure checks to influence the election — 100 times larger than allowed.
HVF bundled these megagifts and, on a single day, reported transferring money to all participating state parties, some of which would then show up on FEC reports filed by the DNC as transferring the exact same dollar amount on the exact same day to the DNC. Yet not all the state parties reported either receiving or transferring those sums.
Did any of these transfers actually happen? Or were they just paper entries to mask direct transfers to the DNC?
For perspective, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza was prosecuted and convicted in 2012 for giving a handful of associates money they then contributed to a candidate of his preference — in other words, straw man contributions. He was sentenced to eight months in a community confinement center and five years of probation. How much money was involved? Only $20,000. HVF weighs in at $84 million — more than 4,000 times larger!
So who should be worried? Everyone involved — from the donors themselves to Democratic fundraisers to party officials who filed false reports and, ultimately, to Clinton campaign and HVF officials looking at significant legal jeopardy.
Don't take my word for it. Our complaint is built entirely on the FEC reports filed by Democrats, memos authored by Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook, and public statements from Donna Brazile and others.
The only question that matters: Was the law broken? If the answer is yes, then the corrupt Clinton machine should be held accountable.
- Backer is a veteran campaign counsel, having served more than 100 candidates, PACs, and political organizations, including the Committee to Defend the President. He is founding attorney of political.law, a campaign finance and political law firm in Alexandria, Va.
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Senior White House Executives and The President of the United States under the Obama Administration are well aware of this case. Some of them engaged in crimes and cover-ups in order to exploit the illicit assets of this case.
Senior executives at The Department of Transportation, The Department of Energy, The Securities and Exchange Commission and some Law Enforcement agencies received profits from the illicit assets of this case and operated stand-downs, reprisal efforts, and cover-ups of regulatory and law enforcement efforts for their own private ends.
Campaign financiers in a Cartel-based association operating in violation of Racketeering RICO laws exchanged cash, stock warrants, prostitutes, revolving doors, internet and media manipulation, and other goods, for government contracts, grants, stock pumps, and federal appointments. This Cartel operated Ener1, Abound, Solyndra, Ivanpah, Severstal, A123, Fisker, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Solar City, Abengoa, and other facade efforts which stood as fronts for the asset transfers. Key portions of the illicit asset transfers occurred as skims-off-the-top as the money was transferred from the U.S. Treasury to private accounts. Other key portions of the illicit asset transfers occurred as stock market pump-and-dump profiteering under a process that U.S. Treasury inspectors call: “Unjust Reward Graft by State and Federal Employees...”.
The Obama/DNC Administration controlled media outlets including: CNN, NBC/MSNBC ,The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times,Twitter, Google, Linkedin, Facebook, The New Yorker, Salon, Cracked, WIRED, Ars Technica, Vox, Gawker Media, The Verge, TechCrunch, All Disney Properties, Gizmodo, Univision, Kotaku, All Sony Properties, LifeHacker, Jezebel, All William Hearst properties, San Jose Mercury News, Deadspin, Jalopnik, Reddit.com, The Daily Dot, The Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, MediaMatters, Politico, PolitiFact, ValueWalk, New York Daily News, TIME, Newsweek, Snopes, Motley Fool, Think Progress and related publications. This media control accounted for 95% of U.S. Domestic media impressions at one time and allowed the suspects to avoid news circumspection and to put character assassination and doubt-creation hit jobs on adversaries.
“Don’t worry, it’s green and it will save penguins”- PR was used as a smoke-screen to attempt to lull voters into the typical “...move along, nothing to see here” political play-book ploy.
After receiving more taxpayer cash hand-outs than any group in U.S. history, given to the smallest financially connected group, from the same federal administrators, while sabotaging only the competitors of that group, the facade companies all suddenly failed. This has never happened before in the history of America. The evidence points to only one conclusion: An organized crime activity was interdicted and the activity was definitely a felony-class criminal collusion effort.
Silicon Valley oligarchs were the primary instigators and beneficiaries of the scheme. Their leaders included Steve Westly, John Doerr, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Steven and Alison Spinner, Elon Musk, Jared Cohen, Steven Rattner, Steven Jurvetson, and related parties.
They used intermediate operations which include In-Q-Tel, Media Matters, New America Foundation, Think Progress, Deloitte Consulting, CBRE, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey Consulting and lobbyists to operate their scheme.
Over 980 billion dollars, at a minimum, from the U.S. Treasury has been routed to the bank accounts of the suspects. Including losses from the Afghanistan War, which the suspects held a profiteering interest in, the calculated losses to U.S. taxpayers, to date, exceeds 6 trillion dollars.
Leaks from Jofi Joseph, Wikileaks, Guccifer, Panama Papers, HSBC Swiss Leaks and over 72 similar leaks have now confirmed these facts. Secret Service agents, who stood in the White House observing these actions, have reported their disgust at the corruption. FBI agents, who have investigated these incidents, have reported their disgust at the lack of authorized actions for this case. Over 80 members of the United States Congress have started to demand a Special Prosecutor for the investigation of this matter. Over 1000 witnesses have offered to testify if a credible Special Prosecutor is appointed.
A new Administration has now been elected. The will and the resources to prosecute this case are now in place.