We learned yesterday that the Federal Election Commission [1], the federal agency that oversees all electoral campaign finance-related issues, declined to recommend prosecution of former president Donald Trump for ordering Michael Cohen to make the illegal October 2016 hush money payments to two women Trump paid for sex, a crime that landed Cohen in prison.
You wonder how this is possible, especially after learning the 6 FEC commissioners deadlocked 2-2 (tie goes to the malefactor, under FEC rules) and therefore no action will be taken against “Individual One” for ordering the crime Cohen went to prison for.
Then you recall (with the aid of Wikipedia, less than two seconds away) that until December 2020, after he lost the “rigged, stolen” election, Trump left the FEC without a quorum to vote on ANYTHING. There was no enforcement of anything campaign finance-related by the FEC because Trump left four positions vacant.
Wikipedia tactfully soft-pedals Trump’s deliberate, and convenient, dereliction of duty this way:
Because of the quorum requirement, and the failure of President Trump in nominating replacement commissioners, the FEC was unable to function from late August 2019 to December 2020, with an exception of May to July 2020.
They provide a handy graph that tells the story succinctly, after giving the bones of the explanation of how the six member commission deadlocked 2-2:
Once again he successfully obstructs justice and avoids prosecution. Mazel tov, Don!
So, here we have another example of Mr. Trump’s defiant and unimpeachable public corruption that, like every other immoral, arguably criminal act of his long and unrepentant life so far, he will not be held accountable for. The FEC “exonerating” Trump, in spite of his proven guilt, is just another reason for Trump’s wildly loyal 38% base to celebrate, their guy got away with it again– in your fucking face!
A parent who treats a kid this way, never reining in the child’s anti-social impulses, never holding the kid accountable for anything no matter how extreme, creates a monster. Frederick Christ Trump, Donald’s unloving father, a monster himself, built angry little Donald in his own image.
A legal system that allows monsters to game it is itself a kind of monstrosity, since it depends on the moral qualms of the powerful monster CEO not to treat it as the monster’s play thing. The monster will fire or obstruct every regulator, investigator, inspector general and anyone else who serves “at his pleasure,” with predictable results. The rest of us are just along for the hideous ride, until we organize and figure out how to stop the vomit-inducing tilt-a-whirl.
[1]
The FEC administers federal campaign finance laws. It enforces limitations and prohibitions on contributions and expenditures, administers the reporting system for campaign finance disclosure, investigates and prosecutes violations (investigations are typically initiated by complaints from other candidates, parties, watchdog groups, and the public), audits a limited number of campaigns and organizations for compliance, and administers the presidential public funding programs for presidential candidates.[8]
Until 2014, the FEC was also responsible for regulating the nomination of conventions, and defends the statute in challenges to federal election laws and regulations.
The FEC also publishes reports, filed in the Senate, House of Representatives and presidential campaigns, that list how much each campaign has raised and spent, and a list of all donors over $200, along with each donor’s home address, employer and job title. This database also goes back to 1980. Private organizations are legally prohibited from using this data to solicit new individual donors (and the FEC authorizes campaigns to include a limited number of “dummy” names as a measure to prevent this), but may use this information to solicit political action committees. The FEC also maintains an active program of public education, directed primarily to explaining the law to the candidates, their campaigns, political parties and other political committees that it regulates.
source
gratuitousblahg 
Non disclosure agreements are in no way illegal and the prosecutors literally made-up a charge that didn’t exist of “interfering with an election”. Any other lawyer should have mopped the floor with that case and thrown it right into the dumpster where it belonged, but Cohen was dumb enough to hire and trust Clinton operative and super slimey attorney Lanny Davis who was clearly working against Cohens best interests and helped to railroad him in an ruined his life all to try to make Trump look bad in the end, which really didn’t even work since Stormy Daniel’s has since come out and said she never even had sex with Trump.
There are legitimate things to rag on Trump about, but this story was made for low IQ simpletons to follow and get hyped up about. Anyone who still talks about it and cannot see it for the sloppy political hit job it was, is pathetic.
Pasco:
Thank you for this well-written and authoritative-sounding comment. The Cohen hush money payments to Stormy Daniels (“Woman 1”) and a former Playboy model (“Woman 2”) were found to be a violation of campaign finance laws, and Cohen was prosecuted by Jeff Sessions’ DOJ. To dismiss Cohen’s conviction for “interfering with an election” as a political hit job to hurt Trump, requires leaving out many important details. Cohen pled guilty to:
tax evasion, making false statements to a federally-insured bank, and campaign finance violations. The plea was entered followed the filing of an eight-count criminal information, which alleged that COHEN concealed more than $4 million in personal income from the IRS, made false statements to a federally-insured financial institution in connection with a $500,000 home equity loan, and, in 2016, caused $280,000 in payments to be made to silence two women who otherwise planned to speak publicly about their alleged affairs with a presidential candidate, thereby intending to influence the 2016 presidential election.
(the whole DOJ plea announcement, including all the sordid details of the campaign finance violation (which involve the National Inquirer and David Fucking Pecker), is at https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/michael-cohen-pleads-guilty-manhattan-federal-court-eight-counts-including-criminal-tax)
Of course it is legal, as you say, in most cases, to pay someone you had sex with to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The payment itself was not the crime — it was paying them as part of a political campaign to hide facts that would have certainly hurt the candidate. If two women Trump gave money to in October 2016 (through Cohen) had been free to talk publicly about having extramarital sex with Trump right before the election, he likely would not have won the Electoral College vote. Their legally enforceable silence had great political value to Trump, well in excess of the $280,000 he had Cohen pay them.
As you say, there are legitimate things to rag on Trump about, and one of them was his deliberate delay in appointing a quorum on the FEC, disabling the agency that oversees campaign finance violations. Trump left the FEC without any ability to enforce campaign finance law, after Cohen pled guilty to campaign finance violations he committed at the request of Individual One
The recent 2-2 vote among Trump’s December 2020 FEC appointees, the recusal of one and abstention of another, probably tell us more than we’ll ever know about the political fix at the FEC that kept Trump safe from being indicted in connection with that crime.
Peace and keep reading!