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Legal experts weigh in on emails released by Donald Trump Jr. - ABC News

posted onJuly 12, 2017
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Article snippet: After Hillary Clinton, ABC News spoke to legal experts about whether Trump broke any laws. Trump posted on Twitter on Tuesday four pages of purported emails between him and music producer Robert Goldstone, who arranged the meeting with the Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, saying in a statement that he did so "in order to be totally transparent." The email exchange appears to have begun on June 3, 2016, when Goldstone reached out to the eldest son of then-candidate Donald Trump. The most relevant law, a campaign finance rule, makes it unlawful to "knowingly solicit, accept, or receive" a "contribution" from a foreign national or foreign government, according to experts. Violators can be fined by the crime, even a felony. One Republican lawyer told ABC News that whether Trump committed a crime depends on whether he solicited something "of value," adding that the case is worthy of additional investigation. The attorney said that while he thinks it is clear that Trump solicited something, since the definition for solicitation is very broad, he speculates that Trump will argue that the information he solicited was not of value. Norm Eisen, a former ethics czar for the Obama administration and the co-founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, tweeted Tuesday that the meeting "clearly violates campaign finance law." Richard Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, , believes that oppositional research on... Link to the full article to read more

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