Trump: a Serial Abuser of Campaign Finance Law

There is a fear that finding President Trump not guilty of abuse of power in the U.S. Senate will cause him to revert to and possibly even expand on the abuses of power he has displayed in the past. In the area of campaign finance law, Trump has already displayed a pattern of illegal behavior.

Leaving aside the payment of "hush" money, in which either Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal could have derailed Donald Trump's presidential campaign in its latter stages by revealing their respective relationships with him, the pattern of violating campaign finance law began with Trump's televised appeal to the Russian government that if it is listening, please try to find Hillary Clinton's missing 30,000 emails, and the media would appreciate it. Trump's pattern of violating campaign finance law continued when he tried to justify the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting, attended by three top campaign officials, that "everybody" would have taken the meeting; also, he described getting "dirt" on Hillary Clinton as legitimate "opo (opposition) research."

The pattern continued when in an Oval Office interview with George Stephanopolos, President Trump said that if he had information that a foreign entity had negative information about a political rival, he would take a call and then decide if he would report the call to the FBI or some other  governmental entity. Knowing Trump's practice of seeking advantage of a political opponent by any means necessary, if one foreign entity had a dump truck load of dirt, and another had only a thimble's full, which call would Trump be most likely to report? Hint: it would not be the dump truck load of dirt.

Finally, coming to Trump's public request to China to investigate the Bidens because Hunter Biden served on the board of a Chinese company, and the demand made to Ukraine to link investigations to a White House visit, and the release of military aid/security assistance to the 2016 presidential election, these are further indications of Trump's lack of respect for campaign finance law. This linkage is bribery under 18 U.S.C. 201 (b), a quid pro quo as referenced in that statute, and a violation of campaign finance law by exchanging an action of a foreign entity, investigations of the Bidens and Ukraine's possible meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, with a "thing of value," dirtying up a potential 2020 election political opponent, Joe Biden.