We knew that Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort shared private polling data with the Russian government which was hacking into the Democrats’ computers and running a social media campaign against Trump’s opponent. We knew members of the Trump family were thrilled that the Russians were doing this.
But it wasn’t just the Trump campaign involved in all this. It was one of Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul’s top operatives:
Imagine for a moment if it had come out during the 2016 campaign or in the first year of the Trump presidency that GOP political operatives were accused of illegally funneling Russian money into the Trump campaign.
Now, some five years later, that’s precisely the accusation federal prosecutors are making in a new case in DC.
What took so long?
According to an indictment unsealed Monday in D.C. federal court, a pair of GOP operatives allegedly conspired to conceal their scheme — and siphon thousands of dollars in illegal foreign money from a Russian businessman into Trump campaign coffers.
All this took place as the national media and FBI scoured the Trump campaign for any potential source of Russian ties or, more importantly, infusions of Russian cash. Allegations like these would have been explosive and politically damaging to Trump.
But now, five years since some of the alleged crimes took place, the Justice Department decided to charge the case.
Former prosecutors and campaign finance experts told TPM that the delay was unusual.
“It seems like the kind of case that doesn’t require five years of investigation,” Barb McQuade, a former U.S. attorney, told TPM, adding that the allegations themselves didn’t suggest the kind of complicated financial dealings that may require years of probing to unspool.
“It seems like the transactions were finite and complete by, at the latest, early 2017. So it’s a fair question why someone did not charge this,” she added.
“When you’re dealing with high-profile people in a case like this, then it’s justified to be more suspicious of the timing,” Larry Noble, a former FEC commissioner, told TPM.
Here’s what the indictment is all about:
The indictment itself says that Jesse Benton, a Kentucky GOP political operative who helmed Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)’s 2014 re-election campaign and who has worked closely with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), acted as a straw donor to siphon $25,000 into Trump Victory, a PAC formed by the RNC and the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.
Benton, who was later pardoned by Trump for his conviction in an unrelated campaign finance scheme, allegedly plied his connections to secure a photo op between Trump and a Russian businessman in Philadelphia on Sept. 22, 2016.
Prosecutors said that Doug Wead, a conservative author, helped Benton do that, and introduced him to the Russian. The person was allegedly a business partner of Wead’s, and was the source of the contributions. Prosecutors are silent on the identity of the Russian businessman, saying only that he was a business partner of Wead’s.
The Russian allegedly wired $100,000 from a Vienna bank account in September 2016, $25,000 of which Benton allegedly spent on a contribution to the Trump campaign in October 2016. Benton pocketed the remaining $75,000, the indictment alleged.
It sounds like Parnas Furman stuff. I wonder how much of this stuff went on that remains undiscovered? These foreigners all really wanted Donald Trump to be president.
So why the delay? Nobody knows for sure:
“There are a lot of reasons cases can be stalled,” Noble said.
But to McQuade, the timing — along with everything else that the country saw under the Trump administration over the past several years — suggests that something made the prosecutors “scramble” to file the case before the five-year limit began to run out this month. The allegations themselves went to the heart of what was under investigation from 2016 onwards.
“It advances the notion that Russia supported Trump, and we’ve seen that, not only in the Mueller indictments, the efforts by Russia to support Trump, but here again we have Russia business influence,” she said.
They just loved him, they really loved him.