How Trump can get taxpayers to pay the cost of campaign dirt-digging
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) in June. Credit: Pool via AP/Alexander Drago
For a self-professed billionaire, President Donald Trump can be notoriously careful about spending his own money. Four years ago, he led many people to believe he would self-fund his campaign, but he did not come close. By then, he'd long been known for stiffing his company's contractors. And the new book by his niece, Mary L. Trump, attests to the president's personal stinginess.
Trump's fondness for getting others to bankroll things that he wants also might apply to what political professionals call opposition research. After all, finding the goods to plausibly attack an opponent's character can be expensive.
The so-called Christopher Steele memos, financed by the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign, reportedly cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. During that 2016 election, Trump seemed to get major "oppo research" for free when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a Clinton nemesis, published private Democratic emails hacked by Russian operatives.
If the Trump campaign paid for this help, the transaction presumably would have been discovered and addressed in former special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. It was not.
For more than a year, Trump & Co. targeted current rival Joe Biden for dirt-digging. In the latest effort to paint Biden as corrupt through his son's past private dealings, Trump's Republican allies in the Senate last week were brandishing subpoenas, possibly for the elder Biden's former advisers. The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), was still working to secure witness depositions voluntarily, but the negotiations sputtered, Politico reported.
One focus for Johnson remains Hunter Biden's former role with the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma. After a lot of drama, TV appearances, denunciations and waving of papers, Rudy Giuliani, the president's reportedly unpaid personal attorney, never presented a sensible case for wrongdoing.
But along the way, the ex-mayor's activities splashed up on him. In September, one month before Giuliani's ex-associate Lev Parnas was indicted on campaign finance charges, Parnas' wife received $1 million from a lawyer for a Ukrainian oligarch, Dmytro Firtash, who's been ducking U.S. extradition on bribery-related charges.
That's according to federal prosecutors. But whatever the Firtash transaction meant, at least Trump didn't have to pay. Nor did Trump have to compensate for the disruption of federal operations involved in his own failed gambit to get the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into Joe Biden and the Democrats. Had this unheard-of bit of extracurricular diplomacy succeeded, Trump could have effectively outsourced his opposition research. Instead, Trump was impeached in the House. (He was acquitted in the Senate.)
Taxpayers can be relied on to finance Trump's research interests on another front beyond the Senate probe. Attorney General William Barr announced nearly a month ago on Fox News that Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham's investigation of the Russia probe's origins would yield "developments" before the summer is over.
Regardless of whether Durham's project helps the campaign, at least the president won't have to foot the bill.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
