People hoping for criminal justice reckoning for Donald Trump got some bad news recently after the Federal Election Commission gave the former president a pass regarding his alleged hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
As The Washington Post's Aaron Blake points out, the FEC ruled that it will not move forward with an investigation into Trump alleged role in the payoff. According to Blake, the decision is both "unsurprising and rather inexplicable."
"It's unsurprising because this is par for the course for the FEC," Blake writes. "The bipartisan agency in charge of enforcing campaign finance law has been mired in a state of gridlockfor many years, with its key enforcement decisions regularly breaking down along party lines and sometimes without enough members to even function. The decision that was disclosed Thursday pitted two Democrats in favor of moving forward against two Republicans voting against it."
Blake writes that it's been proven that Trump committed a crime.
"The key issues when it came to Trump's culpability were whether he was involved in the payments and whether they were intended to influence the election being held shortly thereafter. [Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen] said publicly in 2018 that both things were true and later testified under oath to the same effect," writes Blake, adding that while Cohen's history made him not the best witness, Trump's own Justice Department also implicated him in the crime.
Read the full analysis over at The Washington Post.