ILLEGAL BRI
Over the course of a single seven-minute media availability on Thursday, President Donald Trump
encouraged two foreign nations — Ukraine and China — to open investigations he hopes will implicate former vice president and current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in (unfounded) corruption allegations.
Not only was Trump’s conduct unseemly, but, as the head of America’s elections watchdog explained on national television Friday, it could be illegal.
That’s because federal elections law prohibits any person from soliciting, accepting, or receiving anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a US election. The law doesn’t just apply to money — investigations or political dirt that benefit a particular campaign counts as “things of value” too. And in case Trump is unclear about this, the current chair of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has gone out of her way to try to explain it to him.
On Friday’s edition of
Morning Joe, FEC chair Ellen Weintraub declined to talk about the specifics of Trump’s case but noted that “the law is pretty clear. ... It is absolutely illegal for anyone to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with any election in the United States.”