New York Magazine: No, Donald Trump Jr. Doesn’t Have a First Amendment Right to Get Freebies From the Russians

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As shoe after shoe after shoe keeps dropping about the Trump Tower meeting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort had with a Russian lawyer and other questionable intermediaries, there has been a quiet but significant effort by prominent legal minds to defend, or at least be skeptical of, the whole affair. The thrust of these counterarguments is that the main characters did nothing wrong because the law simply doesn’t penalize anything that happened at the meeting.

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But Adav Noti, an attorney with Campaign Legal Center, isn’t convinced. His organization filed a complaint on Thursday with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice alleging that the Trump campaign effectively solicited an illegal campaign contribution by procuring the incriminating Clinton evidence from Veselnitskaya. Noti told me in an interview that most of the hypos Volokh laid out in his article “aren’t covered by the statute” because the law already contains an exception for volunteer services to a campaign — information that is offered voluntarily and that you otherwise can’t ascribe value to.

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