US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8781

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump is using money donated to his re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee to pay for his lawyers in the probe of alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Following Reuters exclusive report on Tuesday, CNN reported that the Republican National Committee paid in August more than $230,000 to cover some of Trump’s legal fees related to the probe.

RNC spokesperson Cassie Smedile confirmed to Reuters that Trump’s lead lawyer, John Dowd, received $100,000 from the RNC and that the RNC also paid $131,250 to the Constitutional Litigation and Advocacy Group, the law firm where Jay Sekulow, another of Trump’s lawyers, is a partner.

The RNC is scheduled to disclose its August spending on Wednesday. The Trump campaign is due for a disclosure on Oct. 15.

The U.S. Federal Election Commission allows the use of private campaign funds to pay legal bills arising from being a candidate or elected official.

While previous presidential campaigns have used these funds to pay for routine legal matters such as ballot access disputes and compliance requirements, Trump would be the first U.S. president in the modern campaign finance era to use such funds to cover the costs of responding to a criminal probe, said election law experts.

Smedile said the RNC payments to Trump’s lawyers were ”from a pre-existing legal proceedings account and do not reduce by a dime the resources we can put towards our political work.”

It was not clear how Trump’s legal costs related to the Russia probe would be allocated between the campaign and the RNC, one of the sources said.

Dowd declined to say how the president’s legal bills were being paid, adding: “That’s none of your business.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller is looking at possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in last year’s election, and whether Trump may have obstructed justice by firing Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, among other actions.

Moscow has denied meddling in the U.S. election, and Trump has denied any collusion or obstruction.

Reuters could not determine how large a legal bill Trump has incurred to date from his lawyers on the Mueller investigation. Trump hired his longtime New York lawyer Marc Kasowitz to head his defense team in May, but Kasowitz stepped down in July, with Dowd taking over the lead role, according to people familiar with the situation.

Special White House counsel Ty Cobb, who is a salaried staff member, is also working on the matter.

The Trump campaign has paid law firm Jones Day almost $4 million, according to campaign filings, mostly for routine campaign legal expenses like ballot access disputes, vendor contracts, human resources and compliance with state and federal laws. It has also responded to Russia-related inquiries on behalf of the campaign by, for example, providing documents to Congress.

The reason Trump is able to tap into his campaign funds for legal expenses is because for the past decade, presidential candidates have abandoned public financing for their campaigns. Instead, they have built networks that collect millions of dollars from private donors, a move that comes with less restrictions on how the money is spent.

Barack Obama in 2008 was the first to eschew public financing for his campaign, and all the major-party candidates followed suit in 2012 and 2016, campaign filings show.

Trump also filed for reelection the day he took office in January, two years earlier than any previous president, ensuring a fund of millions in campaign cash would remain at his disposal.

According to its most recent filing to the Federal Election Commission, Donald J. Trump for President Inc had almost $12 million on hand by the end of June, an increase of over $4 million since January.

Adav Noti, a senior director at the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group that describes itself as nonpartisan, said public campaign funds - as opposed to the private funds Trump has raised - cannot generally be used for expenses arising from criminal investigations, or for any expenses that arise after the campaign is over.

President Bill Clinton, who ran two publicly funded campaigns, had supporters start legal defense funds and used his own insurance to help pay legal bills during the Whitewater investigation. He still wound up with millions of dollars in personal debt which he paid off through speaking fees he earned once he left office.

Hillary Clinton, who ran a privately funded campaign, paid millions to campaign lawyers at Perkins Coie to handle routine legal matters, according to campaign filings. Her campaign made no payments to the Washington law firm Williams & Connolly, which represented her in the probes of her use of a private email server when she was U.S. Secretary of State.

Her lawyer, David Kendall of Williams & Connolly, declined to comment on how he was paid.

Campaigns also have discretion to pay legal fees for others besides the president.

According to a July filing, the Trump campaign paid $50,000 to the law firm of Alan Futerfas, who is representing Donald Trump Jr. Futerfas did not respond for requests for comment.

A number of other current and former Trump staffers have also recently hired lawyers.

On September 20 2017 16:28 Acrofales wrote:

Since when do people use OkCupid or Tinder to find friends?

This was some spin about how conservatives being "discriminated against" in the dating world led to them voting for Trump. Not how they can't make friends, for which I'd say [citation needed], because neither the Federalist article nor the WaPo response mention friendship anywhere.

On September 20 2017 21:44 oBlade wrote:

Nonetheless, it's true that self-identified liberals and Democrats are more prone to disconnecting people over politics, dumping friends, with Democratic women being the most likely.

http://fortune.com/2016/12/19/social-media-election/

The Arctic ice cap melted to hundreds of thousands of square miles below average this summer, according to data released late on Tuesday.

Climate change is pushing temperatures up most rapidly in the polar regions and left the extent of Arctic sea ice at 1.79m sq miles at the end of the summer melt season.

This is the time when it reaches its lowest area for the year, before starting to grow again as winter approaches. The 2017 minimum was 610,000 sqmiles below the 1981-2010 average and the eighth lowest year in the 38-year satellite record.

Scientists from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) said the rate of ice loss this summer had been slowed by cool mid-summer weather over the central Arctic Ocean. The record minimum came in 2012, when the ice area fell to 483,000 square miles below the 2017 extent.

Ted Scambos at NSIDC said the Arctic sea ice had set a record for the smallest winter extent earlier in 2017 and was on track to be close to the 2012 record minimum until July. But a cloudy and cooler than normal August slowed the melting.

“Weather patterns in August saved the day,” Scambos said. The fast shrinking Arctic ice cap is increasingly thought to have major impacts on extreme weather patterns much further south, due to its influence on the jet stream. Floods, heatwaves and severe winters in Europe, Asia and North America have all been linked to the Arctic meltdown. “It’s bound to have an impact on global climate,” Scambos said.

The 2017 sea ice level fits with an overall steady decline over the decades, but one that varies from year to year, Scambos said. “It’s not going to be a staircase heading down to zero every year,” he said. “[But] the Arctic will continue to evolve towards less ice. There’s no dodging that.”

Rod Downie, head of polar programmes at WWF, said: “From space, the loss of Arctic sea ice is the clearest and most visible sign of climate change, and human beings are responsible for most of it. We are engineering our planet and its climate.”

“That’s not good for the people of the Arctic who depend upon sea ice for their traditional way of life and for people across the world who depend on a stable climate,” he said. The Arctic could be virtually free of ice in summer within people’s lifetimes, he warned, and called for more action on climate change by reducing carbon emissions.

On September 20 2017 16:45 Falling wrote:
I suspect where you fall on on the pro-life/choice divide would be a fairly significant issue in a close relationship. Like, it's hard for me to see a very good middle ground between "It's a woman's right" and "It's murdering babies." And if there is a middle ground, one wonders just how dearly they hold either of those positions really. I could see it as a very reasonable deal breaker.


There's this one guy I heard about who put something along the lines of "Just a dope dude, looking to do some dope stuff." ...but I think it was one of the regular dating sites, rather than tinder- it's foggy in my head now. But I respect that dope dude who only wanted to do some dope stuff.

On September 20 2017 17:02 LegalLord wrote:
Read both stories and they both seem kinda dumb. The WaPo story is defending... well I dunno what (feels almost as if it was just written to say "nah I disagree"), and the Federalist story looks almost as if it's really just an attack on the modern wave of rent-seeking feminism without ever mentioning that and making a deeper cultural argument out of it all. The feminists of that breed are pretty distasteful people as a whole, but no real need to associate with them. And to be fair, a certain breed of religious conservative is every bit as unpleasant as those feminists so it's not like it's a one-sided phenomenon.

On September 20 2017 22:47 Danglars wrote:

I think it did a fair job of bringing up untalked-about consequences to greater sorting in relationships. If you agree that politics has gotten more vicious, and statistics show it's hurting intimate relationships, maybe in two more election cycles the percentage that really thinks the other side is evil people and not wrong people and would never date/marry grows.

The article was far too short to make a comprehensive cultural argument. Leave the origins, side-analysis, solutions, and further cultural analysis to long-form academic papers. Especially ones that can fund surveys of the iGen/Millenial generations on more cultural and relationship preferences.

On September 20 2017 08:55 crms wrote:
Conservatives whining about progressive women not dating them is hilarious. It really turned my day around.

On September 20 2017 22:57 Acrofales wrote:

Well, that is a very valid point to raise. However, it was not the core argument of the article you cited, which was quite explicitly a male chauvinist whining about how girls didn't want to date him because he wanted to forbid them to be the boss of their own uterus.

I do agree that there is a danger to increasingly polarizing the debate to the point where we no longer debate at all, but simply label everything on the other side of the aisle "the enemy" to be vanquished in combat elections, and assortive relationships are both a cause and an effect (it reinforces the echo chamber feedback). But that is not the part that of the article that the WaPo response criticized either, and you emphatically disagreed with that response. But I am quite happy to see that your takeaway message is the far more subtle (and important) message about how polarizing the debate harms society, rather than the QQ about how pro-choice ladies swipe left on pro-life men.

On September 20 2017 22:44 Doodsmack wrote:
It probably has a lot to do with the risk of having an unwanted baby.

On September 20 2017 23:04 Plansix wrote:

This man's take on conservative publications will be evergreen.
+ Show Spoiler +

On September 20 2017 23:09 Tachion wrote:

This was the reasoning I got when I asked my wife about it. She said that if terminating an unwanted pregnancy was going to be a deal breaker for the relationship then you might as well let that information be known beforehand.

On September 20 2017 23:13 Godwrath wrote:

Leaving out the first comment should be punishable by law in this case.