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Trump's Campaign Payments Totalling $130K
- severine 9y agoTL;DR FEC Data proves Trump laundered money to pay off Stormy Daniels. The odds it's a coincidence are 8,000,000 to 1.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- adamrezich 9y agoI guess I don't understand; is any of this actually illegal?
- BLanen 9y agoYes.
- severine 9y ago[1] Campaign finance law, from the FEC: > Using campaign funds for personal use is prohibited. > Commission regulations provide a test, called the “irrespective test,” to differentiate legitimate campaign and officeholder expenses from personal expenses. Under the “irrespective test,” personal use is any use of funds in a campaign account of a candidate (or former candidate) to fulfill a commitment, obligation or expense of any person that would exist irrespective of the candidate’s campaign or responsibilities as a federal officeholder. > More simply, if the expense would exist even in the absence of the candidacy or even if the officeholder were not in office, then the personal use ban applies. [1] https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making-disbursements/personal-use/ https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making-di...
- adamrezich 9y agoThis still seems inconclusive to me. I'm no lawyer, but why would Trump want to pay for this porn star's silence unless he became a Presidential candidate?
- paws 9y agoCool, I hadn't seen this kind of usage of the bitwise operator before. for (let bitMask = 0; bitMask < 1 << scanWindowLength + 1; bitMask++) {
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jorblumesea 9y agoI never understood why Trump thought it was a good idea to become President. He has such a history of shady deals and corruption, why put all of that into such public scrutiny? If you are up to no good, the presidency is one of the worst things you could hope to win.
- ojbyrne 9y agoEgo means you do stupid things. Seems like Obama’s mild ribbing a few years ago was the impetus.
- braderhart 9y agoThis makes him vulnerable to blackmail and other things. It is a huge national security risks and in fact I am pretty sure why the USA was formed in the first place, was in the best interests and security of the citizens.
- AckSyn 9y agoI see common talking points being parroted but no substance to them. Wild claims like these, without evidences, should be frowned upon here.
- rdiddly 9y agoI don't think he ever thought he would win.
- jorblumesea 9y agoThat's almost certainly true, but why risk it in the chance you did win? Your sketchy family business is now under the purview of the public, which is exactly what is happening now.
- adamrezich 9y agoWhat evidence is this assertion you and your parent comment are making based on?
- Libturd 9y agolibturds have a rough 7 years to go
- braderhart 9y agoCan't wait to see the trial that never happens and the protests that never go anywhere.
- IronWolve 9y agoJust ignore the facts they had to round up. /s
- dtf 9y agoHere's Susan Simpson's latest blog on the matter, with some interesting thoughts on what might have happened and why: https://viewfromll2.com/2018/03/11/on-the-origins-of-stormy-danielss-130k-settlement-payment-and-the-probability-of-the-disbursement-records-matching-the-settlement-amount-by-random-chance/ https://viewfromll2.com/2018/03/11/on-the-origins-of-stormy-...
- credit_guy 9y agoThe post shows good investigative work, but there’s one week argument. Supposedly the hush money had to be paid by the Trump Campaign and not the Trump Organization because for the latter “ $130K isn’t the kind of rounding error a company is likely to miss“. But then the Campaign pays the Org the $130k, and the Org faces the same problem. One way or another the Org needs to write a check to someone representing Stormy Daniels, and that expense will be noticed by internal accountants, internal and external Audit, and ultimately the IRS. the fact that there are 5 received checks that add up to the same number is quite irrelevant.
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- ipsin 9y ago...and it's flagged...
- hendler 9y agoGiven the math, code and relation to finances should this be flagged? The nature of the gist is hacker worthy.
- dragonwriter 9y agoI don't think it should be, but I'm not at all surprised that it is (and I don't think it's mostly partisan, though there's probably some of that.)
- grzm 9y agoI suspect the flags are due to the anticipation or evidence of the resulting HN discussion, regardless of the worthiness of the submission itself: of the 20 comments (including the dead), only three are about the submission itself. That's a pretty low signal-to-noise ratio.
- ipsin 9y agoI really think it's just an indication of the flagging dynamic. If 20% flags vs upvotes kills an article, all "partisan" articles will be killed. Though I'm personally more interested in this as an article of criminal justice. I mean, most of the times I chafe at "X million to 1" statistical stories, because they're sometimes the kind of bullshit used to railroad defendants, but I do wish we had some discussion. I mean, many there's an honest explanation for payments grouping together to almost equal an even tens of thousands of dollars? I'm not being sarcastic. I want that discussion, I want to be exposed to that potential counterpoint.
- grzm 9y ago> "I really think it's just an indication of the flagging dynamic. If 20% flags vs upvotes kills an article, all "partisan" articles will be killed." I'm speaking of what motivates people to choose to click flag as opposed to upvote or just leave it alone. That's different from the effect those flags have on the submission.
- ggg9990 9y agoThis is cute but ultimately pointless. Trump has survived sharing classified information with Russia. Fucking a porn star and paying her off isn’t going to really cause any problems for him. And Jeff Sessions certainly won’t indict him.
- Fjolsvith 9y agoWell, isn't Trump the Commander in chief? That means that he absolutely gets to decide what classified material can be shared with whomever and it's not illegal if he does it, regardless of whether it's a dumb move. He can give away all our secrets and it isn't illegal.
- neximo64 9y agoOnly if Stormy accepted AMEX's card processing fees.
- ianai 9y agoSlightly longer TLDR: They perumatated the partial sums of a set of transactions around a timeframe and found a near combination to 130k “The payments marked with * add up to $129,999.72, just as Simpson found. Note that we only needed to span 7 transactions to find this sequence, but were considering sequences of up to 12. Again, this is the only way to select from a window of 12 transactions to get any number within $1 of a $10,000-round number near $130,000. We tested 8,386,560 possibilities, looking for false positives. We found one positive result, and it's exactly the result we expect to find if the "just a coincidence" hypothesis is false: Around the time the Daniels payment was made, for the amount the Daniels payment was in.”