The Washington D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign and an affiliated super PAC violated federal election law by spending nearly $6 million improperly. This amount is significantly higher than the $130,000 that a Manhattan court convicted former President Donald Trump of misreporting in business records during the same 2016 campaign.
It’s important to note that while the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Justice Department reviewed Trump’s payments made through his attorney Michael Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement, they chose not to prosecute him. However, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg pursued the case under New York law, linking the alleged FEC violation to state business record violations.
The payments to Cohen were recorded as legal expenses by the Trump Organization, but Bragg argued that these payments were actually illegal contributions to Trump’s campaign.
In the case of the Clinton campaign, the D.C. Circuit found that the super PAC Correct the Record coordinated extensively with Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, spending close to $6 million on activities such as polling, fact-checking, and media engagement. Despite this coordination, neither Correct the Record nor the Clinton campaign reported these expenditures as campaign contributions, instead categorizing them under a supposed “internet exemption.”
The FEC initially dismissed the complaint against the Clinton campaign and Correct the Record, but the D.C. Circuit Court found this dismissal to be erroneous. The court ruled that the FEC had acted contrary to law and stretched the internet exemption beyond its lawful limits. The court directed the FEC to revise its findings in accordance with this decision.
Separately, in 2022, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) agreed to pay $113,000 to settle an FEC investigation into alleged campaign finance violations related to funding the Steele dossier. The Clinton campaign had hired Perkins Coie, which then hired Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on Trump. These payments were reported as legal services, a misclassification similar to what Trump was accused of with his payments to Cohen.
The inconsistency in handling these cases—where Clinton and the DNC paid a fine while Trump faced criminal charges—highlights concerns about a potential two-tiered justice system. Critics argue that this disparity underscores a bias in the enforcement of campaign finance laws.