You don't have to literally send the money to a campaign for it to be legally considered a donation to the campaign. If you're helping a campaign financially, you're making a donation.
If I start buying millions of pencils and drop them off with teachers saying "this is from Trump", how is that a donation?
Because you're spending money to help the campaign.
How does it implicate Trump in wrongdoing?
In your scenario, it doesn't because Trump isn't asking you to do it. It's your campaign finance violation.
Cohen has testified that Trump told him to pay off the mistresses. That is what implicates Trump.
Cohen did this on his own and billed the candidate the standard large amount for "lawyer stuff".
These are both false. According to Cohen, Trump told him to make the payments. And Cohen did not bill the campaign (aka "the candidate"). In fact, it's not completely clear in the stories I've read that there is a bill at all.
You still don't understand how public key cryptography works.
The "public" or "private" label on the keys is arbitrary. Facebook does not require that you upload "your private key" or any key. You are not required to only have one keypair. These encrypted "chat" programs only protect data in transit. They have never protected data at rest (beyond whatever the OS does for data at rest)
While there is a desire on the part of the *army* to move people from post to post there are definitely ways around it and those are definitely leveraged by military intelligence units where you can spend twenty years at the same post.
As long as you never want to be promoted again. Which also means you have an up-or-out problem unless you have a sponsor with stars on their shoulders.
A general will get whatever they want when it comes to staffing. But not very many people are that close to someone that high in command.
You don't get to fully interview and vet contractors, you're often told to just accept them as-is (at least in the business world)
In the government contracting world, the government employee overseeing the contract will let the contracting company know they are not happy with a particular contractor. Which will result in the removal of that contractor.
There's way too much follow-on money at stake for the contracting company to make their government sponsor angry.
They don't receive the same level of training as actual employees, in regards to safety, security, procedures, etc
Contracts typically require the contractors to take more-or-less the same training courses the civilian government employees are required to take.
It should be obvious you should not hire a cookie cutter IT goon whose only qualifications are a Microsoft Certificate for a serious job at a serious agency.
A contracting company that supplied such people to the NSA would be thrown out very, very quickly.
When proposing the contract to the government, it's pretty common to include the resumes of "key" people who will be working on the contract. So if the contract is for something more advanced than basic IT support, the fact that those people are "cookie cutter IT goons" should cause the company to lose the bid for the contract. And even if they win the bid, they won't get any follow-on work when they fail to deliver.
Wow, are you desperately searching to justify this.
since Trump paid Cohen, it is not a campaign donation. Legally it is considered a loan
A "loan" intended to influence the election.
Again, the rules change when you run for office. Don't run for office if you want to pay off your mistresses. Pay off your mistresses first, then run for office later.
There is no limit on what a candidate Trump) can spend of his own money
There is no limit on what a candidate can contribute to their campaign. But by having it be Cohen's money, it is not Trump's money. Even if Trump later paid Cohen back.
Also, campaign expenses must be properly documented. So if Trump had actually spent his own money and properly documented the expense as "payment to silence mistress", there's no problem. Trump didn't do either.
Again, you are wrong. It is not illegal to pay someone to keep quiet; happens all the time.
The fact that it happened during a campaign makes different rules come into play. The fact that you don't like these rules does not make them disappear.
The Justice Dept. tried to convict John Edwards on the exact same charges; they lost, and here's why: when an act can serve "dual purposes", in this case, hiding embarassing information from Edward's family, in addition to hiding information that may hurt his election chances, the act cannot be considered illegal.
You're doing an excellent job making shit up. Edwards was found not guilty at trial. That's it. Someone being found not guilty does not set a legal precedent. Otherwise murder would be legal by now.
Indictment and trial On May 24, 2011, ABC News and the New York Times reported that the U.S Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section had conducted a two-year investigation into whether Edwards had used more than $1 million in political donations to hide his affair and planned to pursue criminal charges for alleged violations of campaign finance laws.[118][119][120]
On June 3, 2011, Edwards was indicted by a federal grand jury in North Carolina on six felony charges, including four counts of collecting illegal campaign contributions, one count of conspiracy, and one count of making false statements.[121]
After postponing the start of the trial while Edwards was treated for a heart condition in February 2012, Judge Catherine Eagles of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina scheduled jury selection to begin on April 12, 2012.[122] Edwards's trial began on April 23, 2012, as he faced up to 30 years in prison and a $1.5 million fine.[123]
In a related development, on March 13, 2012, the Federal Election Commission ruled that Edwards' campaign must repay $2.1 million in matching federal funds. Edwards' lawyers claimed the money was used, and that the campaign did not receive all the funds to which it was entitled, but the commission rejected the arguments.[124]
Twelve jurors and four alternates were seated, and opening arguments began April 23, 2012.[125] Closing arguments took place May 17, and the case went to the jury the next day.[126]
On May 31, 2012, Edwards was found not guilty on Count 3, illegal use of campaign funding (contributions from Rachel "Bunny" Mellon), while mistrials were declared on all other counts against him.[2] On June 13, 2012, the Justice Department announced that it dropped the charges and would not attempt to retry Edwards.[3]
I mean, isn't 'protection your reputation' something you can do at any time regardless of running for public office?
"Running for public office" triggers additional rules. Those rules consider the payments to be a campaign contribution and/or expense (contribution if non-campaign funds were spent, expense if campaign funds were spent).
In this case, it's a contribution. The contribution was not properly documented and it exceeded the maximum allowed contribution.
It is considered a contribution/expense because the payoff is intended to influence the election, not just make someone look better to the public.
Am I mistaken? Did they get a warrant before the papers were shredded and discarded
Yes, you are mistaken. First, there was a warrant. Second, you can get the warrant post-shredding. Just because you hid the evidence (by shredding) does not make it immune to a warrant. The entire point of warrants is to pierce your expectations of privacy, but only when a judge says the government can.
Also: What kind of idiot uses a strip-shredder for anything he really wants to keep secret? Have they developed a way to reassemble crosscut shreads
The kind of idiot that decides to be a fixer for a crooked real estate developer. And yes, they have developed a way to reassemble crosscut shreds as long as the shreds are big enough. The size you get from a shredder you buy at Staples is plenty big.
If so, how do they avoid the "ransom note assembled from cut out newspaper letters" risk of reassembling fine shreads into somethig that looks coherent but is nothing like the original.
By dumping the shreds on a flatbed scanner and scanning both sides. Then having a computer re-assemble the shreds based on characters that cross more than one shred. It's just a big jigsaw puzzle with identically-shaped pieces.
What's going on is the payment is considered a campaign donation, because it was made by a private person in order to further the campaign. The campaign donation was not properly declared, and exceeded the maximum allowed donation to a political campaign.
Congresspeople using Congress's funds to pay off accusers isn't a private person spending money to further the campaign, failing to document it properly and exceeding contribution limits. It's different and it should be illegal, but it's not.
You'd think after Snowden they would bring in and train servicemen/women instead of contractors.
The military expects you will not stay long at any particular post. You get your assignment, complete it, and move on to another assignment. The military does this because their main goal is fighting wars, not intelligence gathering. The various billets just round-out your knowledge but you're primarily there to shoot people.
For something like the NSA, this is pretty bad. Because it takes quite a while to build up the expertise they need, and the servicemen/women rotate out too quickly. So they use contractors because they can stay in the same position for many years.
You could argue that they should use civilian government employees, since they too can stay in the same position for many years. But that runs into a big problem: pay. There's a formal pay scale for government employees, and it caps out very far below what an NSA contractor can make in the private sector (even if they were not working as a government contractor).
Raising the pay scale means raising it across the entire government, so that's not a good option. There is a way to have exceptions to the standard pay scale, but they're not easy to push through and having something the size of the NSA operating almost entirely on exceptions is not workable. So now we're down to requiring Congress and/or OMB creating a separate pay scale for computer professions that is significantly higher than the normal one for computer professionals. Which, aside from the massive bureaucratic hurdles in doing that, would result in a lot of non-computer-professional government employees trying to switch their classification to this pay scale so they can get paid more.
Or they just use contractors.
As for whether or not that would prevent leaks, service men and women also leak. You mentioned Snowden, but there's also Manning.
The governor. You know when they say on the news "The governor declared a state of emergency"? That.
Is there a (default) time-limit for the emergency state?
Duration is stated in the declaration.
I would be better if (a) the FD simply got a better plan and/or (b) Verizon simply provided something better at no extra charge to First Responder work devices -- instead of their usually gouge the customer as much as possible SOP.
A has voters whining about the waste of tax dollars, since the cap was sufficient for normal operations. AT&T is doing B, which may be causing some consternation at Verizon.
Actually, the Fire Department bought a plan with a cap sufficient for normal operations. And the contract also said if a state of emergency was declared, the Fire Department would notify Verizon, and Verizon would lift the cap.
The first two parts happened. The third didn't. Verizon now says they "mistakenly represented the plan" to the city. AKA, lied to the city about the plan.
As for net neutrality, this situation could not have happened if net neutrality was still in-force, because net neutrality was implemented by making Verizon's Internet service a Title II service. Aside from net neutrality, Title II rules also would forbid throttling here.
So when net neutrality was ended by making it a Title III service, the rules changed and throttling could happen.
Net neutrality was implemented by making Verizon's Internet service a Title II service. The rules for a Title II service provide net neutrality, and also would have prevented this throttling.
Converting Verizon's Internet service to Title III removed net neutrality, and allowed this throttling.
And then people would complain about just how expensive the Fire Department's data plan is, when they normally don't need that much data. So surely they could have a cheaper contract where Verizon would turn off the cap when there was a state of emergency. My tax dollars ar bein wasted!!!!!!!!!!
Calling Verizon when there's a state of emergency isn't actually all that much additional work. That declaration triggers a whole bunch of things, and including "call the phone company" is not a big addition. Verzion just has to actually do what they promised to do in their contract.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't a donation made to the campaign.
You don't have to literally send the money to a campaign for it to be legally considered a donation to the campaign. If you're helping a campaign financially, you're making a donation.
If I start buying millions of pencils and drop them off with teachers saying "this is from Trump", how is that a donation?
Because you're spending money to help the campaign.
How does it implicate Trump in wrongdoing?
In your scenario, it doesn't because Trump isn't asking you to do it. It's your campaign finance violation.
Cohen has testified that Trump told him to pay off the mistresses. That is what implicates Trump.
Cohen did this on his own and billed the candidate the standard large amount for "lawyer stuff".
These are both false. According to Cohen, Trump told him to make the payments. And Cohen did not bill the campaign (aka "the candidate"). In fact, it's not completely clear in the stories I've read that there is a bill at all.
So when the opposition (who is also running for said office) PAYS for false intel to UNFAIRLY influence the same election...is that illegal as well?
If the campaign paid for it, and the campaign properly documented what they were paying for, it's legal.
You still don't understand how public key cryptography works.
The "public" or "private" label on the keys is arbitrary.
Facebook does not require that you upload "your private key" or any key.
You are not required to only have one keypair.
These encrypted "chat" programs only protect data in transit. They have never protected data at rest (beyond whatever the OS does for data at rest)
While there is a desire on the part of the *army* to move people from post to post there are definitely ways around it and those are definitely leveraged by military intelligence units where you can spend twenty years at the same post.
As long as you never want to be promoted again. Which also means you have an up-or-out problem unless you have a sponsor with stars on their shoulders.
A general will get whatever they want when it comes to staffing. But not very many people are that close to someone that high in command.
You don't get to fully interview and vet contractors, you're often told to just accept them as-is (at least in the business world)
In the government contracting world, the government employee overseeing the contract will let the contracting company know they are not happy with a particular contractor. Which will result in the removal of that contractor.
There's way too much follow-on money at stake for the contracting company to make their government sponsor angry.
They don't receive the same level of training as actual employees, in regards to safety, security, procedures, etc
Contracts typically require the contractors to take more-or-less the same training courses the civilian government employees are required to take.
It should be obvious you should not hire a cookie cutter IT goon whose only qualifications are a Microsoft Certificate for a serious job at a serious agency.
A contracting company that supplied such people to the NSA would be thrown out very, very quickly.
When proposing the contract to the government, it's pretty common to include the resumes of "key" people who will be working on the contract. So if the contract is for something more advanced than basic IT support, the fact that those people are "cookie cutter IT goons" should cause the company to lose the bid for the contract. And even if they win the bid, they won't get any follow-on work when they fail to deliver.
I'll give you the story about Reality Winner, but that's one out of three.
Even that one is a technology story - she was caught because of data embedded in the printout of the documents she leaked.
False. John Edwards was put on trial and was acquitted by the jury. That doesn't set a legal precedent.
If you are not running for office, campaign financing rules do not apply.
To avoid this issue, pay off your mistresses first. Then run for office later.
Wow, are you desperately searching to justify this.
since Trump paid Cohen, it is not a campaign donation. Legally it is considered a loan
A "loan" intended to influence the election.
Again, the rules change when you run for office. Don't run for office if you want to pay off your mistresses. Pay off your mistresses first, then run for office later.
There is no limit on what a candidate Trump) can spend of his own money
There is no limit on what a candidate can contribute to their campaign. But by having it be Cohen's money, it is not Trump's money. Even if Trump later paid Cohen back.
Also, campaign expenses must be properly documented. So if Trump had actually spent his own money and properly documented the expense as "payment to silence mistress", there's no problem. Trump didn't do either.
So I don't like my senator and I find a woman willing to claim he raped her. I pay her $100 to not go public, he gets removed from office?
You also committed an FEC violation when you hired her, and another violation when you paid for her silence.
The difference here is Trump ordering the payment (assuming Cohen isn't lying). That makes it Trump's FEC violation too.
Again, you are wrong. It is not illegal to pay someone to keep quiet; happens all the time.
The fact that it happened during a campaign makes different rules come into play. The fact that you don't like these rules does not make them disappear.
The Justice Dept. tried to convict John Edwards on the exact same charges; they lost, and here's why: when an act can serve "dual purposes", in this case, hiding embarassing information from Edward's family, in addition to hiding information that may hurt his election chances, the act cannot be considered illegal.
You're doing an excellent job making shit up. Edwards was found not guilty at trial. That's it. Someone being found not guilty does not set a legal precedent. Otherwise murder would be legal by now.
Alan Dershowitz, no fan of Trump
[Citation required]
No, actually the FEC ruled the opposite. But thanks for the continued lying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Indictment and trial
On May 24, 2011, ABC News and the New York Times reported that the U.S Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section had conducted a two-year investigation into whether Edwards had used more than $1 million in political donations to hide his affair and planned to pursue criminal charges for alleged violations of campaign finance laws.[118][119][120]
On June 3, 2011, Edwards was indicted by a federal grand jury in North Carolina on six felony charges, including four counts of collecting illegal campaign contributions, one count of conspiracy, and one count of making false statements.[121]
After postponing the start of the trial while Edwards was treated for a heart condition in February 2012, Judge Catherine Eagles of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina scheduled jury selection to begin on April 12, 2012.[122] Edwards's trial began on April 23, 2012, as he faced up to 30 years in prison and a $1.5 million fine.[123]
In a related development, on March 13, 2012, the Federal Election Commission ruled that Edwards' campaign must repay $2.1 million in matching federal funds. Edwards' lawyers claimed the money was used, and that the campaign did not receive all the funds to which it was entitled, but the commission rejected the arguments.[124]
Twelve jurors and four alternates were seated, and opening arguments began April 23, 2012.[125] Closing arguments took place May 17, and the case went to the jury the next day.[126]
On May 31, 2012, Edwards was found not guilty on Count 3, illegal use of campaign funding (contributions from Rachel "Bunny" Mellon), while mistrials were declared on all other counts against him.[2] On June 13, 2012, the Justice Department announced that it dropped the charges and would not attempt to retry Edwards.[3]
Trump self-financed his campaign
No, he didn't. Here's his campaign financing: https://www.opensecrets.org/pr...
"Donald J Trump for President" is his campaign. Scroll down and you can see all the sources of funding, which was primarily campaign contributions.
He directed Cohen to pay with a check for crying out loud. He would've paid even if he wasn't running for office.
Running for office triggers a different set of rules. Don't run for office if you want to pay off your mistresses.
Even if it had been a publicly-funded campaign, see the John Edwards precedent.
John Edwards was put on trial for his campaign finance crimes. There was no precedent set, he was just acquitted by the jury.
I mean, isn't 'protection your reputation' something you can do at any time regardless of running for public office?
"Running for public office" triggers additional rules. Those rules consider the payments to be a campaign contribution and/or expense (contribution if non-campaign funds were spent, expense if campaign funds were spent).
In this case, it's a contribution. The contribution was not properly documented and it exceeded the maximum allowed contribution.
It is considered a contribution/expense because the payoff is intended to influence the election, not just make someone look better to the public.
Am I mistaken? Did they get a warrant before the papers were shredded and discarded
Yes, you are mistaken. First, there was a warrant. Second, you can get the warrant post-shredding. Just because you hid the evidence (by shredding) does not make it immune to a warrant. The entire point of warrants is to pierce your expectations of privacy, but only when a judge says the government can.
Also: What kind of idiot uses a strip-shredder for anything he really wants to keep secret? Have they developed a way to reassemble crosscut shreads
The kind of idiot that decides to be a fixer for a crooked real estate developer. And yes, they have developed a way to reassemble crosscut shreds as long as the shreds are big enough. The size you get from a shredder you buy at Staples is plenty big.
If so, how do they avoid the "ransom note assembled from cut out newspaper letters" risk of reassembling fine shreads into somethig that looks coherent but is nothing like the original.
By dumping the shreds on a flatbed scanner and scanning both sides. Then having a computer re-assemble the shreds based on characters that cross more than one shred. It's just a big jigsaw puzzle with identically-shaped pieces.
Hush Money is illegal if it comes out of campaign funds. It is not illegal if it comes out of other sources.
This is wrong. The money is considered a campaign contribution.
It wasn't properly documented as a contribution, and it exceeded the maximum allowed contribution.
Yes, it actually is.
What's going on is the payment is considered a campaign donation, because it was made by a private person in order to further the campaign. The campaign donation was not properly declared, and exceeded the maximum allowed donation to a political campaign.
Congresspeople using Congress's funds to pay off accusers isn't a private person spending money to further the campaign, failing to document it properly and exceeding contribution limits. It's different and it should be illegal, but it's not.
He was found not guilty at his trial.
Sure! Right after you go ahead and provide and excerpt of the relevant part of the contract for this:
It's "unlimited" but subject to throttling over 25 gigs, as spelled out in the contract.
You are trusting third party with your enc pub key. Thereby they can do whatever with it. Including using to decrypt your messages
You really don't understand how public key cryptography works.
You'd think after Snowden they would bring in and train servicemen/women instead of contractors.
The military expects you will not stay long at any particular post. You get your assignment, complete it, and move on to another assignment. The military does this because their main goal is fighting wars, not intelligence gathering. The various billets just round-out your knowledge but you're primarily there to shoot people.
For something like the NSA, this is pretty bad. Because it takes quite a while to build up the expertise they need, and the servicemen/women rotate out too quickly. So they use contractors because they can stay in the same position for many years.
You could argue that they should use civilian government employees, since they too can stay in the same position for many years. But that runs into a big problem: pay. There's a formal pay scale for government employees, and it caps out very far below what an NSA contractor can make in the private sector (even if they were not working as a government contractor).
Raising the pay scale means raising it across the entire government, so that's not a good option. There is a way to have exceptions to the standard pay scale, but they're not easy to push through and having something the size of the NSA operating almost entirely on exceptions is not workable. So now we're down to requiring Congress and/or OMB creating a separate pay scale for computer professions that is significantly higher than the normal one for computer professionals. Which, aside from the massive bureaucratic hurdles in doing that, would result in a lot of non-computer-professional government employees trying to switch their classification to this pay scale so they can get paid more.
Or they just use contractors.
As for whether or not that would prevent leaks, service men and women also leak. You mentioned Snowden, but there's also Manning.
And who gets to decide what is an "emergency".
The governor. You know when they say on the news "The governor declared a state of emergency"? That.
Is there a (default) time-limit for the emergency state?
Duration is stated in the declaration.
I would be better if (a) the FD simply got a better plan and/or (b) Verizon simply provided something better at no extra charge to First Responder work devices -- instead of their usually gouge the customer as much as possible SOP.
A has voters whining about the waste of tax dollars, since the cap was sufficient for normal operations. AT&T is doing B, which may be causing some consternation at Verizon.
Actually, the Fire Department bought a plan with a cap sufficient for normal operations. And the contract also said if a state of emergency was declared, the Fire Department would notify Verizon, and Verizon would lift the cap.
The first two parts happened. The third didn't. Verizon now says they "mistakenly represented the plan" to the city. AKA, lied to the city about the plan.
As for net neutrality, this situation could not have happened if net neutrality was still in-force, because net neutrality was implemented by making Verizon's Internet service a Title II service. Aside from net neutrality, Title II rules also would forbid throttling here.
So when net neutrality was ended by making it a Title III service, the rules changed and throttling could happen.
Um yes.
Net neutrality was implemented by making Verizon's Internet service a Title II service. The rules for a Title II service provide net neutrality, and also would have prevented this throttling.
Converting Verizon's Internet service to Title III removed net neutrality, and allowed this throttling.
And then people would complain about just how expensive the Fire Department's data plan is, when they normally don't need that much data. So surely they could have a cheaper contract where Verizon would turn off the cap when there was a state of emergency. My tax dollars ar bein wasted!!!!!!!!!!
Calling Verizon when there's a state of emergency isn't actually all that much additional work. That declaration triggers a whole bunch of things, and including "call the phone company" is not a big addition. Verzion just has to actually do what they promised to do in their contract.