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Comment by everybodyknows | Hacker News Reader

Transferring campaign donations to personal use is a felony, precisely because it does amount to bribery as enabled by money laundering. Recent case, ending in prison conviction:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/former-congressman-dunc...

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According to the supreme court (https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/16/politics/supreme-court-campai...), it is legal to make personal donations to your campaign and then have the campaign pay you back with post election fundraising. What is to stop a candidate from colluding with a bank? Let's say a banker offers the candidate a 1MM loan with 0.5% apr. The candidate receives that money and makes a 1MM loan to their campaign at 10% apr. Now the candidate potentially has a ~100K/year annual revenue stream coming from the repayment of their loan. All they need to do is rile up their supporters about whatever hot button issue is most salient with their constituents to keep the post election donations coming in. This is particularly scary when it comes to house elections since given the short terms, house members are pretty much always in election fundraising mode.

Now, perhaps the scheme I just outlined is a bit too obvious, but I certainly don't doubt that far more sophisticated money laundering schemes that leverage the recent supreme court decision are happening now and will happen in the future.

Everybody knows you've got to launder it by having the campaign by services from a company you control. Besides, you can just bribe the people on the FEC (or rely on party loyalty) to not investigate.

https://www.salon.com/2022/05/17/fec-block-action-on-alleged...

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