prizrak;n3548524 said:
You are very right on politics being dirty everywhere and I am not in any way defending Trump here, just was wondering about legal statutes.
There's lots of overlapping laws that could be at play, even before campaign finance fraud. Even just starting at the baseline: is this money considered a gift to Donald J. Trump as just a person and not a presidential candidate? Then the limit for giving money to someone is $14K, without needing to declare receiving it on your taxes. Is a payment made on your behalf the same thing as a gift? What if you didn't know about it? What if you did? (which is interesting, given his rant on Fox News yesterday when he said Michael Cohen DID represent him, but at the same time all along he said he claimed he didn't even know about it...which aren't mutually exclusive, but...).
In other news, as of this morning, my company's now up to 17 in regards to US-based manufacturers and vendors we use, who have announced price increases by this summer, specifically calling out the tarrifs as at least part of the reasons.
One this morning: "Like many other companies, we have experienced higher-than-anticipated costs for major commodities such as steel, aluminum, and packaging, largely driven by overall inflationary growth and market reaction to recently announced trade tariffs." It's effectively translating to a 5% increase in cost for metal office furniture (including cubicle panels, desk bases, file cabinets, reconfigurable glass walls, etc).
In other other news, this whole North Korea thing is pretty epic.