The curious case of Trump and the foreign donors
by digby
This thing just gets stranger by the minute. To catch you up, Josh Marshall has been reporting that the Trump campaign has been soliciting donations from foreign politicians all over the world. This is illegal, needless to say. But the assumption is that it's just a standard Trump campaign screw up born of the fact that they are only now trying to get donations and they don't know how to do it properly. Marshall speculated that they bought an email list and didn't cull it properly for foreign email addresses. Making that kind of mistake isn't really excusable but for some reason Trump is allowed to flagrantly violate laws all over the place and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and say, "that's the Donald!"
Marshall has an update that makes it even weirder than it already was. The fundraising letters are still going out:
They weren't actually just from Trump. One was from the Trump campaign. The other was from a pro-Trump Super Pac called Crippled America PAC.
Now, normally (i.e., completely separate from anything to do with Trump) it would be entirely unremarkable that someone was getting fundraising emails both from a campaign and also Super PACs supporting the campaign. They're likely both buying lists from the same vendor or even different vendors of likely Trump voters.
But remember, Tim is a foreign citizen and part of the government in another country. We've already speculated about the various ways all these foreign legislators could have ended up on Trump's list. The more we've looked into it, it seems increasingly implausible that he got this list from a list vendor. Not impossible just not likely at all. It now seems more probable that the Trump Organization simply had these emails in some business related database and decided to dump them into the email hopper for the fundraising blitz or just found some site that had a zip file of foreign government officials and used that.
As I've said, all of these possibilities are outlandish and ridiculous. But we know for a fact that he has and continues to spam members of Parliament in the UK, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland and Iceland and possibly others. So one of these completely preposterous set of facts has to be true.
And here's where we get to coordination, which is a big no no.
Given what I've said above, the existence of this list almost has to originate in Trump Derpland. A virtual certainty. So how did the same list end up in the hands of a Trump SuperPac? I looked up Crippled America PAC and as of their last filing just a couple weeks ago, they're total budget was $40. No m or b after that $ sign, forty bucks, the price of a fancy dinner. So obviously CAP was just stood up and actually started operating just now. And now they're showing up in Tim's inbox.
Again, normally you'd just say, they're both buying the list from the same vendor. I'm also pretty sure that a good campaign finance lawyer could find a way to get lists from a campaign to its supportive SuperPacs without running afoul of the rules against campaigns coordinating with SuperPacs. But let's be honest, does any of this look like its done by anyone who has the slightest clue about fundraising or campaign finance law? Of course, not.
The letters are from Trump's son. Maybe someone could track him down and ask him about it?
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