Hillary Mislabeled Steele Dossier Payments as ‘Legal Fees’

While we still do not know — indeed, likely will never know — what conduct the Manhattan jury convicted President Trump of committing, one possibility would evidence the gross duality and unfairness of “justice” in America, 2024.  If Trump was convicted of disguising campaign expenses as legal fees in order to influence an election, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s analogous conduct should have resulted in similar treatment by our justice system.  It did not.

In 2022, the Federal Election Commission fined the Clinton campaign for fraudulently mislabeling payments made for the bogus Steele dossier as “legal fees” to the law firm Perkins Coie in the 2016 election.  That is, the payments for the Steele dossier were clearly non-legal campaign expenditures — “opposition research” — but the Clinton campaign falsely labeled them as “legal fees.”  The purpose of the Clinton misrepresentation was to hide the fact that the Russia collusion fraud was paid for by the Clinton campaign; thus concealing her involvement in sleazy conduct influencing the election and embroiling the country in a three-year paroxysm of the Russia collusion hoax.  The Steele dossier was, until then, the most effective campaign dirty trick in US history — although arguably the Bragg prosecution eclipses the dossier in the dirty tricks pantheon. (READ MORE: Liberals Willfully Deluded Themselves on the Russia Collusion Hoax)

Trump may have been convicted of similar conduct, though his treatment was starkly different.  The Manhattan jury may have found Trump guilty of mislabeling an alleged campaign expenditure, the non-disclosure payment to Stormy Daniels, as legal fees.  (Many have argued the non-disclosure payments are not campaign contributions and have discussed the legion of defects in the prosecutor’s case and the prosecution’s and judge’s misconduct.  Here I only address the dichotomy between how Trump and Clinton were treated based on essentially the same conduct.)

For her campaign misconduct, the Clinton campaign was ordered to pay a civil — not a criminal — fine of $8,000.  The Democratic Party was ordered to pay $105,000.  Unlike Trump, Clinton was not the subject of a local DA’s selective prosecution in a county that had voted against her by almost 90 percent. She was not indicted, not charged with any crime, did not have family sexual peccadillos paraded before a court, was not trapped in a courtroom for four weeks just months before the election when she should have been campaigning, and did not have her due process rights trampled. By the way, Clinton’s 2016 campaign was headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. (READ MORE: Post-Trump Verdict, Will the American Right Finally Wake Up?)

So, Hillary Clinton is found to be liable for mislabeling payments for the Steele Dossier as legal fees and gets an $8,000 civil fine; Trump has been found guilty of mislabeling non-disclosure payments as legal fees and is a convicted felon.  Justice in America.

Mr. Daukas served as Principal Deputy and Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, 2020-21; and as a Chief Counsel on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, 2023.

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