This is a piece I posted yesterday on Just Security on the campaign finance law issues raised by the facts emerging about the Trump campaign-Russia contacts. It responds in particular to the constitutional and related concerns that some commentators have expressed about an ostensibly expansive application of the law in these circumstances. ----

If the Trump campaign solicited support from Russians in the race against Hillary Clinton, did it, or any of its staff, have the mental state required for prosecution under federal criminal law? The discussion so far has largely centered on Donald Trump Jr.’s actions in scheduling the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, and for a number of commentators, the issue seems to be his own personal liability. Professor Andy Grewal has made the point that the bar for establishing criminal intent is high. He is not alone in this judgment. Professor Saikrishna Prakash agrees.

It is without doubt correct that people should not go to jail for breaking a law unless the rule they violate is clear and they had the requisite intent to violate it. This is, of course, especially imperative when they are engaged in core First Amendment-protected activities like participating in a political campaign.

In the case of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, however, this argument can be--and has been-- both overstated and misdirected. Now that Jared Kushner has provided his account of the meeting, there is additional material useful in analyzing the campaign’s culpability.

Moreover, in sorting out these issues, it is essential to keep in mind what conduct the campaign finance law does, or does not reach. Commentators like Professor Prakash and Eugene Volokh fear that even if the Trump campaign, its candidate and it senior staff sought and received Russian Government help, an overly expansive construction of the campaign finance laws to reach this conduct could present major constitutional risks. For example, journalists might be liable for seeking or accepting from foreign nationals information intended to damage a political candidacy. These concerns are also off the mark, because the there is nothing exceptional or overbroad in a reading of the law that covers the Trump campaign conduct.

A reader has asked whether I am abandoning this site for others in writing about the campaign finance issues in the Russia-Trump campaign matter. Not so. But I did agree to write on this subject for Just Security, and I have touched on other related issues for Lawfare

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Here are the various Just Security postings grouped together. (One earlier posting relates to another subject altogether, but all the recent ones address the Trump campaign-Russia issues.)

Also, there are always interesting questions to be asked about the ethics of political speech and action, not just the governing law. I wrote for Lawfare yesterday on President Trump’s defense of the June 6 meeting at Trump Tower. He takes it to be nothing more than politics-as-usual. I question that.

In 1968, the Nixon presidential campaign successfully persuaded the South Vietnamese government to scuttle peace talks with the North. The goal was to end any possibility of an election-eve accord that would boost the prospects of the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey. Candidate Nixon and his agents assured the South Vietnamese, who took the deal, that a Nixon presidency would better protect their interests. This was a glaring case of foreign interference with elections. The election turned out to be close and the intervention was very plausibly a factor in the outcome. See, e.g., Tim Weiner, One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon 19-26 (2015).

This is the kind of “interference” in an election that Congress is preparing to investigate. It remains to be seen whether the inquiry will eventually become more far-ranging-- whether it will also examine other forms of foreign influence over the electoral and policy processes that are less brazen but still consequential.

For example, the Federal Election Commission recently could not agree on strengthened restrictions on campaign spending that serves foreign interests. Foreign nationals are prohibited generally from making contributions or expenditures in federal elections, but the rules are porous. Companies controlled by foreign nationals, including those directly or indirectly controlled by foreign governments, may establish PACs and fund campaigns with money contributed by their American executives. The law prohibits foreign nationals associated with the ownership or management of the company from directing or indirectly participating in these funding decisions. The enforcement challenge is obvious: how to capture this “participation,” which may include oral directives or suggestions that are not easily discovered. Beyond this, Americans in the employ of the wholly controlled USA subsidiary might guide their funding decisions by close reference to what they believe or know to be their foreign owners’ interests and preferences.

Matt Grossman and David A Hopkins have pronounced many decades of liberal reform to be a failure. In a new book, they argue that the 1970s reform program did not lead to the success of liberal policies but may have been primarily advantageous to "ideological Republicans." For a party that is "a coalition of social groups, each with pragmatic policy concerns," the Democrats wound up undermining the transactional politics among various interests that would produce their preferred policy outcomes. Making matters worse was a shift of voter sentiment against government-driven solutions. The Republicans, happy to oblige the popular sentiment by blocking legislation, fared better than Democrats actually interested in passing it. Grossman and Hopkins conclude that in the future, Democrats "should assess whether each potential change is likely to benefit the Democratic coalition or the more ideological Republicans."

The problem always is the hazard of predicting the partisan or policy impact of any reform measure. To the extent that Grossman and Hopkins are urging Democrats to guess, they are necessarily allowing for the fairly large possibility that they will guess wrong. And even the ways in which they may be wrong are not anticipated all that reliably. In other words, both the benefits and the costs--the shape of success and the look of failure--will be very hard to judge. The mistakes made can be costly.

None of this would matter if those promoting reform could satisfy themselves that it satisfied other measures of success. For example, do those reforms enhance public confidence in the political process, or lessen the risk of corruption in government? Not so much, it seems, which is not to say that things would not be worse on this score without the reforms. But if it is true that reforms have contributed little to the success of the progressive policy agenda, the absence of other consolations, like a government that enjoys the public’s confidence, only compounds the sense of failure and dissatisfaction.

The Grossman/Hopkins argument tends to strengthen the case for targeted modest reforms that don't rest on ambitious expectations about policy or partisan effects. Rather than each party trying to game which reforms will serve their particular interests, they might collaborate on purging the current regulatory system of its inanities, inconsistencies and inefficiencies.

FEC Commissioner Weintraub believes that she has hit upon a regulatory maneuver to stop publicly traded corporations from making independent expenditures, or unlimited contributions to independent expenditure committees.  At a time when newspaper editorialists carry on with attacks on the Commission as “worse than useless,” the Commissioner seems determined to prod the FEC to face the major “money in politics” issues of the day.

This is her theory: foreign nationals cannot make contributions or independent expenditures, which means that the FEC could establish that no corporation with foreign nationals as shareholders could engage in this political spending.  The rule would not bring about this result outright: it would require a corporation to "certify" that it was not making contributions or independent expenditures with these funds.  As a practical matter, corporations with foreign national shareholders could not risk making the certification and would forgo this political spending.  The Commissioner plans to direct lawyers to produce proposals that she and her colleagues can consider in a future rulemaking.

This is an interesting proposal, but it is generally appreciated that a Commission unable to agree on matters of lesser moment will not find a majority in favor of this one.  But even beyond that, the proposal is vulnerable to questions about its viability as a regulatory measure.