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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOMG, you can go to prison for illegal campaign coordination! Who knew?
Hmm, back in February 2011 (the same month that "Hosni Mubarak stepped down from power" Fox Noise couldn't seem to figure out whether Tyler Harber was "President, Wilson Research Strategies" or -- as he was identified in a graphic seconds later -- "VP AND DIRECTOR OF POLITICAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS DIVISION AT WRS." The following year Elections and Campaigns magazine would name the Republican consultant a "Rising Star."
"It was something I had seen other people do."
-- Republican political operative Tyler Harber, at his sentencing
hearing yesterday in Federal District Court in Richmond (VA)
To be sure, with regard to the charges to which he was pleading guilty yesterday, Tyler did admit to Judge Liam O'Grady: "I did it, it was wrong when I did it, and I knew it was wrong when I did it." But then, clearly the federal prosecutors with whom he had arranged his guilty plea had made it clear that he wasn't going to be allowed to use the ever-popular "Everybody Does It" Defense. Nevertheless, he was apparently allowed to point out that he had seen other people do what he did: breaching the legally mandated firewall between a supposedly independent-of-campaigns super PAC and a political campaign (channeling some of the booty to his sister) and fibbing to the FBI about it. (As we all know, the FBI is free to lie to you in an investigation or interrogation, but you can't lie to the FBI.)
One wonders what Supreme Court Justice "Slow Anthony" Kennedy would make of our Tyler, the latest celebrity warrior in the Republican Campaign to Free America of the Menace of Free and Fair Elections (though for reasons we'll go into not acclaimed as a hero by the official Republicans leading the Campaign to Free America of the Menace of Free and Fair Elections), who was sentenced yesterday to two years in the pokey by Judge O'Grady, Slow Anthony's colleague on the federal bench.
It was, as I recall, that esteemed jurist Slow Anthony who disposed of the challenge to the sanctified form of speech known as "money" by declaring that we have no evidence that it causes corruption of our political system. That was, after all, the only reason a jurist of Slow Anthony's esteemed caliber could imagine for even considering interfering with such a divinely ordained right.
The clincher, as I recall the judicial "reasoning," was that elections are not always won by the candidate who spends the most money. This is a conclusion so stupid that you would have thought it landed him on the "tilt" side of the "Too Stupid to Be Entitled to an Opinion" Rule, except that our judicial system doesn't have such a rule.
Read more: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2015/06/omg-you-can-go-to-prison-for-illegal.html
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OMG, you can go to prison for illegal campaign coordination! Who knew? (Original Post)
TexasTowelie
Jun 2015
OP
msongs
(67,395 posts)1. batterto be a criminal bank, no chance in hell of the feds putting you in jail lol nt