If there’s any doubt that the mainstream media will go to any lengths to protect fellow liberal Democrats, the fact that the journalists have avoided covering a lawsuit -- filed in D.C. district court exposing an $84 million money-laundering conspiracy by Democrats during the 2016 presidential election -- should erase it completely.
Of course, these same reporters reacted joyfully to the Democratic National Committee's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act lawsuit filed against the 2016 Donald Trump campaign, WikiLeaks and Russia.
However, according to an article posted on the website of The Federalist magazine by Senior Contributor Margot Cleveland, the lawsuit claims that the conspiracy was carried out by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign during the same presidential election in violation of federal campaign-finance law.
Dan Backer, a campaign-finance lawyer and attorney-of-record in the lawsuit, explained the underlying law in an article for Investor’s Business Daily, where he stated:
Per election, an individual donor can contribute $2,700 to any candidate, $10,000 to any state party committee and (during the 2016 cycle) $33,400 to a national party's main account.
These groups can all get together and take a single check from a donor for the sum of those contribution limits -- it's legal because the donor cannot exceed the base limit for any one recipient. And state parties can make unlimited transfers to their national party.
This “legal loophole” allows “bundlers” to raise large sums of money from wealthy donors -- more than $400,000 at a time -- by filtering the funds to the national committees.
“Suspecting the DNC had exceeded those limits, a client of Backer’s -- the Committee to Defend the President -- began reviewing FEC (Federal Election Commission) filings to determine whether there was excessive coordination between the DNC and Clinton,” Cleveland stated.
“What Backer discovered, as he explained in an interview, was much worse,” the Federalist reporter noted. “There was ‘extensive evidence in the Democrats’ own FEC reports, when coupled with their own public statements that demonstrated massive ‘straw man contributions’ papered through the state parties, to the DNC, and then directly to Clinton’s campaign -- in clear violation of federal campaign-finance law.’”
“On behalf of his clients,” Cleveland added, “on December 15, 2017, Backer filed an 86-page complaint with the FEC,” asking the commission “to commence enforcement proceedings against Hillary Clinton, her campaign and its treasurer, the DNC and its treasurer, and the participating state Democratic committees.”
The document stated: “During the 2016 presidential election,” the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) was established “as a joint fund-raising committee to accept contributions from large donors, some exceeding $400,000.”
“So far, so good,” Cleveland continued. “To comply with campaign finance law, the HVF needed to transfer the donations to the specified recipients, whether the Clinton campaign, down-ticket Democrats, the DNC or state committees.”
However, she added, FEC records “show several large contributions reported as received by the HVF and the same amount on the same day (or occasionally the following day) recorded as received by the DNC from a state Democratic committee, but without the state Democratic committee ever reporting the contribution.”
During a 13-month period, Cleveland noted, “FEC records show some 30 separate occasions when the HVF transferred contributions totaling more than $10 million to the DNC without any corresponding record of the receipt or disbursement from the state parties, thus illegally leap-frogging the state Democratic parties.”
“On the other hand,” she stated, “of the contributions state parties reported as received from the HVF, 99 percent wound up at the DNC. They were transferred immediately or within a day or two, raising questions of whether the state Democratic committees truly exercised control over the money -- something necessary under campaign-finance law to allow a later-legal transfer to the DNC.”
While “the evidence is damning,” the contributor noted, “the Clinton campaign’s control of the contributions did not end once the funds reached the DNC.”
Instead, “public statements by former DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile acknowledged that ‘[a]s Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt’ and ‘expected to wield control of its operations.’”
Therefore, “the contributions qualified as donations to the Clinton campaign for purposes of federal campaign-finance law, and … exceeded the legal contribution limits,” Cleveland noted.
She concluded by again slamming the mainstream media:
Yet even with the overwhelming evidence of tsunami-level campaign-finance criminality -- more than $84 million -- the media instead chases the cloud cast over President Trump because of the $130,000 payment his attorney, Michael Cohen, made to Stormy Daniels.
One wonders what it will take to break through the mainstream media blackout. Maybe a few pointed unpresidential tweets from our commander-in-chief?
As NewsBusters has regularly reported, evidence -- whether overwhelming or not -- does not figure into the media’s overwhelming liberal bias.
