It has been revealed that the Trump campaign paid the expenses of the challenges to the election.
If the campaign paid these expenses, then it's a campaign activity, and campaign activities are explicitly NOT covered by executive privilege.
Oopsie:
It was a month after the 2020 presidential election, and Bernard Kerik was starting to panic. The former New York City police chief and his friend Rudolph W. Giuliani were shelling out thousands of dollars for hotel rooms and travel in their effort to find evidence of voting fraud and persuade state legislators to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
Yet President Donald Trump’s campaign had turned down Kerik’s request for a campaign credit card. The bills were piling up. “How do I know I’m gonna get my money back?” Kerik remembers thinking to himself at the time, according to a recent interview he did with The Washington Post.
The bills went unpaid until after Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro went to bat on their behalf, according to a Republican official, who like some others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Soon after, the campaign cut Kerik a check — with Trump’s approval, according to a former senior campaign official.
That move, in mid-December, smoothed the way for what would eventually be more than $225,000 in campaign payments to firms owned by Kerik and Giuliani — including more than $50,000 for rooms and suites at the posh Willard hotel in Washington that served as a “command center” for efforts to deny Biden the presidency in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The fact that campaign funds were used to finance efforts to subvert Biden’s victory could complicate the former president’s ongoing attempt to use claims of executive privilege to shield documents and testimony from the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6, according to some legal scholars.
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Trump has asked a federal court to block the release of the documents, claiming that they are protected by executive privilege. And Bannon, facing a subpoena from the committee, has cited Trump’s executive privilege claims as a reason for his refusal to comply.
The use of campaign funds “further undermines a wildly broad assertion of executive privilege” by Trump, said Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor. “Executive privilege is typically limited to the protection of communications involving a president’s official duties — not to those relating to personal or political campaign matters,” Ben-Veniste said.
Conservative lawyer Alan Dershowitz disputed that assessment, claiming that “a lot of things that are done on behalf of an incumbent president are done by campaigns.”
Yeah, Dershowitz would say that.
But fellow conservative and former Justice Department official John Yoo agreed with Ben-Veniste. “If he acts as a president, he gets these things we talk about — executive privilege and immunity. But if he’s acting as a candidate, he’s deprived of all of those protections,” said Yoo, one of the stalwart conservative legal scholars who advised Pence’s staff that there was no basis for the vice president to intervene in the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6.
Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Trump, said that the former president “is making executive privilege determinations carefully, based on the merits and in accordance with law and customs of interbranch comity.” He accused the Biden administration of “jeopardizing the office of the presidency by refusing to assert privilege over clearly privileged documents.”
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An RNC spokeswoman declined to comment. The RNC has repeatedly said that it did not pay Giuliani or Kerik because it did not hire them.
That's gotta hurt.
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On Jan. 8, Kerik billed the campaign for $66,371.54, including $55,295 on the rooms at the Willard from Dec. 18 to Jan. 8. The campaign reimbursed Kerik’s firm on Feb. 9 for all but $120 of the total costs, campaign finance disclosures show.
On Feb. 2, the campaign made a $76,566.95 reimbursement payment for “recount: travel expenses” to Giuliani Security and Safety, a Giuliani firm, according to campaign finance disclosures.
I really hope that the judge hearing Trump's bogus assertions of executive privilege, and tells his legal team to pound sand.
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