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Oops! He Did It Again! [1]

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Date: 2023-02-20  

Lock Him Up!

Just a short news snippet from the MaddowBlog and the DOJ.

Texas man Jesse Benton didn’t know when to quit.

Benton has been a GOP “political consultant” since around 2008, working for the odious Pauls, père and fils, another slimy Kentuckian, Mitch McConnell, and a Trump super PAC.

In September 2016, Benton was convicted as part of a 2013 bribery scandal involving an attempt to buy an endorsement. He was sentenced to two years of probation, which he didn’t serve because – of course – Trump pardoned him.

But Benton was then indicted again, not for the 2013 campaign finance violation, but instead for a 2016 campaign finance violation:

[Benton] schemed with another political advisor to funnel political contributions to [Trump’s] 2016 presidential campaign from a Russian national seeking to meet and take a picture with the presidential candidate. Benton arranged for the Russian national – whose nationality Benton concealed from the campaign and the candidate – to attend a campaign fundraising event and to take a picture with [Trump]. As such attendance and engagement required a contribution, Benton caused the Russian national to wire $100,000 to Benton’s political consulting firm to make an illegal foreign contribution to the campaign. To disguise the scheme, Benton created a fake invoice, which falsely identified the funds as payment for consulting services. Benton acted as a straw donor and contributed $25,000 of the Russian national’s money to the campaign, falsely identified himself as the contributor, and pocketed the remaining $75,000. Because Benton falsely claimed to have given the contribution himself, the relevant campaign entities unwittingly filed reports with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that inaccurately reported Benton – instead of the Russian national – as the source of the funds. U.S. DOJ

Benton was convicted last November of conspiring to solicit and cause an illegal campaign contribution by a foreign national, effecting a conduit contribution, and causing false records to be filed with the FEC. Late last week, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

A second pardon does not seem to be in his future.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/20/2154042/-Oops-He-Did-It-Again

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