Lock Her Up: Clinton Could Be in Big Trouble for Dossier Funding

One day after the Washington Post broke the big story showing that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the opposition research firm that came up with the salacious Donald Trump dossier, a complaint was filed against both entities with the Federal Election Commission. The nonprofit Campaign Legal Center accused the Democrats of shielding the payments from the public in violation of current campaign finance law.

“By filing misleading reports, the DNC and Clinton campaign undermined the vital public information role of campaign disclosures,” said Adav Noti, a senior official at the Campaign Legal Center. “Voters need campaign disclosure laws to be enforced so they can hold candidates accountable for how they raise and spend money. The FEC must investigate this apparent violation and take appropriate action.”

According to the CLC, the information contained in the dossier was a matter of tremendous interest to both the media and the American public, making it all the more important that Clinton and the DNC reveal that the dossier was only made possible through their financial contributions.

In a statement, the CLC’s Brendan Fischer said, “Questions about who paid for this dossier are the subject of intense public interest, and this is precisely the information that FEC reports are supposed to provide. Payments by a campaign or party committee to an opposition research firm are legal, as long as those payments are accurately disclosed. But describing payments for opposition research as ‘legal services’ is entirely misleading and subverts the reporting requirements.”

It is of course the height of irony that campaign finance reform was a major plank in Hillary Clinton’s presidential platform. You would think that this beacon of ethics in elections would be the first to cry foul if her campaign was involved in hiding money from the FEC. Well, you would think that if you knew nothing about the Clintons and their hypocritical ways, in any event.

The Clintons always seem to squeak past even the most damning scandals without any legal penalty, so we won’t hold out breath waiting for this one to stick. Even so, the troublesome part of this dossier isn’t that Clinton hid her payments from the media or the Federal Election Commission. It’s that she hid her involvement from the American people for more than a year, all while federal investigators treated this dossier as if it were something more than another piece of opposition propaganda. How long was she planning to sit in silence? Until a rightfully elected American president was thrown out of office on the basis of Democrat-funded rumors? We knew she was bitter about losing, but damn…