“Henry Cuellar Indicted Over Bribery Scheme”

bribery, chicanery, legislation and legislatures

Missed this story (and the Illinois one Derek flags) while traveling:

Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat in a crucial swing district, and his wife were charged with participating in a yearslong $600,000 bribery scheme involving Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank, according to a federal indictment unsealed in Houston on Friday.

The accusations against Mr. Cuellar, 68, and his wife Imelda, 67, center on allegations of bribery and money laundering in connection with their efforts on behalf of an oil and gas company owned by Azerbaijan’s leaders as well as an unnamed bank based in Mexico City, according to the 54-page complaint.

Mr. Cuellar, a Laredo native first elected in 2004, is also accused of acting as an agent of a foreign entity while a U.S. government official — by delivering a speech favoring Azerbaijan in Congress and inserting provisions into aid bills to benefit those who were paying bribes to his family.

I wonder how a Speech or Debate Clause defense might figure into claims based on delivering a speech in Congress.

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Irony Alert

Uncategorized

Politico:

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum on Sunday supported the election fraud allegations made by former President Donald Trump, claiming on CNN: “I think it’s clear that there’s vote-buying going on at a scale like we have never seen before.”…

Trump, never shy about alleging uncorroborated malfeasance by Democrats, said his rivals use “welfare” as an enticement to get people to vote for them. “Don’t underestimate welfare. They get welfare to vote, and then they cheat on top of that — they cheat,” Trump said in his remarks on Saturday.

Burgum didn’t endorse the idea that everyone receiving public assistance is being bribed to vote (“I don’t think that’s the intention that he meant when he said that”) but then circled back to the idea of vote-buying, citing President Joe Biden’s efforts to partially forgive some student loan debt.

“You start trying to give away hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, and it’s not even — it’s like we’re borrowing to give it away. It’s not tax and spend. It’s borrow, borrow from the Chinese, and give it away,” he said.

Burgum added: “Citizens understand those are like preelection payoffs. Those are like, hey, folks, please vote for us because we’re relieving your debt. So at what point does it cross over, programs like student debt, to just vote-buying?” He then answered his own question, saying he saw this as an unprecedented effort at obtaining votes.

A two-term governor, Burgum was part of the 2024 Republican presidential field until dropping out in December. In July 2023, in order to meet the threshold of individual donors each candidate needed to participate in the GOP’s first debate, Burgum announced a campaign to reward individual donors with $20 gift cards.

“Doug knows people are hurting because of Bidenflation and giving Biden Economic Relief Gift Cards is a way to help 50,000 people until Doug is elected President to fix this crazy economy for everyone,” spokesperson Lance Trover said at the time….

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“Pritzker signs election bill that would favor Democrats in November”

ballot access, election administration

The Chicago Tribune has this coverage of a new election law in Illinois that changes the rules of ballot access in the middle of an ongoing campaign:

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has signed into law a comprehensive election bill that would give Democrats a significant advantage toward keeping their legislative majorities before any votes are even cast in the Nov. 5 general election.

Democrats already enjoy legislative supermajorities in the Illinois House and Senate thanks to district maps drawn by party leaders following the 2020 federal census that were crafted to minimize Republican opposition.

But the election bill given final approval by Senate Democrats Thursday, a day after the bill passed the House, would further help Democrats maintain control in the next General Assembly.

Under the new law, local political party organizations can no longer appoint candidates to fill out legislative ballots where the party did not field a primary candidate. Previous law allowed the appointment process within 75 days of the primary.

Capitol News Illinois has more. And The Center Square has a piece, “Candidates feel ‘cheated, violated, robbed’ after Pritzker enacts law ending slating.” (The bill does a lot of other things, too, like moving its quite early presidential nomination deadline up a month earlier, and adding three non-binding and unrelated referenda to the fall ballot.)

One can, of course, oppose the idea of “slating” and prefer that candidates petition, in the abstract and as a general matter. But, the reason many candidates did not petition was the fact that they relied on existing rules to allow them to be “slated” by the party for the general election. That rug has been yanked out from under them, leaving a number of uncontested elections in the upcoming election. Cold comfort offered here from one Illinois legislator: “‘A candidate who would want to run for General Assembly seat after the primary will have to run, as they can today, as an independent or a third-party candidate,’ Harmon said.”

While I typically prefer to share stories without a lot of editorializing, I want to take a moment to offer one small observation. I waited for a couple of day to see how other media outlets would cover the story. After all, we are in an era where there is an explosion in journalists who identify as covering the “democracy beat” or looking for a “democracy angle” in stories. I wondered how the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, or CNN might cover these stories. After all, they are quite attuned to what local county officials in Nevada or Arizona are doing with respect to counting ballots, or every twist and turn of an election bill in Georgia. How about this? As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been any coverage in these or many other major media outlets of America’s sixth-largest state changing the rules of an election in the middle of the campaign to deprive hundreds of thousands of voters of the opportunity to choose a candidate of their preference, and as a number of candidates who behaved in a way relying on existing laws have lost their opportunity to seek office. But there is still time for coverage, of course, particularly as I imagine litigation is coming.

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“Sen. Tim Scott dodges on whether he would accept 2024 election results”

election subversion risk

NBC News:

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott on Sunday did not directly answer multiple questions about whether he’d accept the results of the 2024 presidential election, regardless of who wins.

“At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump,” Scott, a Republican, said the first time he was directly asked whether he would commit to accepting the election results on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”

Asked again by moderator Kristen Welker to answer, “Yes or no?” to the original question, Scott simply said, “That is my statement.”

Pressed a third time to answer the question, Scott said, “I look forward to President Trump being the 47th president — the American people will make the decision.”

Earlier this month, Trump himself told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he would only accept the results of the presidential election in Wisconsin “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” he said, adding, “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

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“Top RNC lawyer resigns after rift grows with Trump”

campaign finance, campaigns, chicanery

WaPo on the campaign losing the adult in the room:

The top lawyer at the Republican Party is resigning after he cited conflicts with his other work obligations and after Donald Trump grew angry about his criticism of the former president’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, people familiar with the situation said Saturday night.

The lawyer, Charlie Spies, is a long-respected GOP election operative who was hired by Trump’s top lieutenants in March after the former president engineered a takeover of the Republican National Committee, which in recent years has been the party’s main operation in both fundraising and field operations.

Trump had approved of the hiring but later learned about additional comments the lawyer had made. Spies in the past had worked for, either directly or indirectly, former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R), Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). He was liked by Trump’s top advisers, who orchestrated his hiring even though they knew he was skeptical of Trump’s false claims of a stolen election….

Spies had been tasked with leading the party’s vast legal spending and election integrity program, and his hire was viewed as a sign Trump’s RNC could attract significant party talent.

Trump aides had worked to save Spies from being ousted after learning Trump was angry about his previous comments. They’re trying to convince Trump that Spies was a stronger election lawyer than others and to forgive the comments, said people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. He was viewed as close with LaCivita and Susie Wiles, Trump’s two top aides….

Spies has also repeatedly defended the presidential election system as being nearly impossible to rig, citing the broad distribution of authority in managing elections. During a 2021 appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he said correctly that allegations of widespread voting machine error in Michigan were false and that repeated recounts in Georgia had failed to show any voter fraud in the 2020 race there.

“Let’s win the elections, and not get worried about things that aren’t true,” he said at that event.

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Trump May Have Some Good Arguments on Appeal in the Hush Money Case If Convicted, But Steven Calabresi is Likely Very Wrong That Donald Trump Would Have a Good First Amendment Defense

campaign finance

I’ve been critical of the NY district attorney seeking to turn the Trump falsifying business records charges into felony charges in the hush money case now on trial in NY. To turn the misdemeanors into felonies, Trump had to be falsifying the business records to further or conceal “other crime.” The three potential baskets of other crimes are (1) violations of the federal campaign finance law (paying campaign expenses with corporate funds, making it an impermissible corporate campaign contribution, failing to disclose the payments, and lying about the payments as legal expenses); (2) violations of a state election law against influencing an election by unlawful means; and (3) violations of state tax law.

Among other things I noted:

Trump also may have serious grounds for appeal in the New York case. It is far from clear that appellate courts would treat the hush money payments as legitimate campaign expenses that needed to be reported, as opposed to personal expenses. And it is uncertain that failing to report a campaign expenditure required by federal law can be a violation of New York state election law against promoting “the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.” These issues may well have to be sorted out by higher courts.

The trial court rejected these arguments in an order before trial, but I expect they will be back on appeal. I also am uncertain if the trial court will require proof to commit or conceal the other crime beyond a reasonable doubt, which seems like it should be required. And I’ve written about my concern about the apparently novel use of the state election law to go after Trump. If the only unlawful means is a federal campaign finance violation, it’s not clear how that could could as “unlawful means” under state law. The state court inexplicably called this a law against “voter fraud and ballot theft” which don’t seem implicated in this case.

So those arguments have a chance on appeal. Aside from those, Steven Calabresi argues that Trump has a First Amendment right to make hush money payments without disclosure, adding: “All that Donald Trump has to do to get any verdict against him overturned is to insist that the predicate felony, which NY alleges he was concealing is not a crime under the Constitution because the First Amendment trumps campaign finance law (pun intended). To the extent that Buckley v. Valeo sustains any such campaign finance violation, Trump should ask the U.S. Supreme Court on his ultimate appeal to overrule Buckley v. Valeo.”

Let’s put aside the state tax law (and maybe the state election law) and focus on the FECA violation. Trump under the FECA theory could have been charged with causing illegal corporate contributions to the campaign and with violating federal campaign finance disclosure laws. For Calabresi to be right, there would have to be a First Amendment right of candidates not to disclose their campaign expenses truthfully. I don’t think even most opponents of disclosure of contributions would find a First Amendment right of candidates to spend money in campaigns without disclosing them. Such payments help deter corruption, inform voters, and help enforce other campaign finance laws. And the Supreme Court in the 2004 case of FEC v. Beaumont has upheld the ban going back to 1910 on direct corporate contributions to candidates. Without such a ban, someone could simply evade individual contribution limits by creating an unlimited number of corporations. The Supreme Court has repeatedly refused to reconsider the Beaumont case even though other aspects of its reasoning have been undermined by subsequent rulings.

In short, Donald Trump may have some potent argument if he’s convicted and loses on appeal, but the First Amendment is not likely one of them.

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