Trump's Campaign Payments Totalling $130K | Hacker News Reader

Trump's Campaign Payments Totalling $130K

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181 pointsseverine53 comments

Here's Susan Simpson's latest blog on the matter, with some interesting thoughts on what might have happened and why:

https://viewfromll2.com/2018/03/11/on-the-origins-of-stormy-...

The post shows good investigative work, but there’s one week argument. Supposedly the hush money had to be paid by the Trump Campaign and not the Trump Organization because for the latter “ $130K isn’t the kind of rounding error a company is likely to miss“. But then the Campaign pays the Org the $130k, and the Org faces the same problem. One way or another the Org needs to write a check to someone representing Stormy Daniels, and that expense will be noticed by internal accountants, internal and external Audit, and ultimately the IRS. the fact that there are 5 received checks that add up to the same number is quite irrelevant.

Cool, I hadn't seen this kind of usage of the bitwise operator before.

  for (let bitMask = 0; bitMask < 1 << scanWindowLength + 1; bitMask++) {

Slightly longer TLDR: They perumatated the partial sums of a set of transactions around a timeframe and found a near combination to 130k

“The payments marked with * add up to $129,999.72, just as Simpson found. Note that we only needed to span 7 transactions to find this sequence, but were considering sequences of up to 12.

Again, this is the only way to select from a window of 12 transactions to get any number within $1 of a $10,000-round number near $130,000.

We tested 8,386,560 possibilities, looking for false positives.

We found one positive result, and it's exactly the result we expect to find if the "just a coincidence" hypothesis is false: Around the time the Daniels payment was made, for the amount the Daniels payment was in.”

I never understood why Trump thought it was a good idea to become President. He has such a history of shady deals and corruption, why put all of that into such public scrutiny? If you are up to no good, the presidency is one of the worst things you could hope to win.

Ego means you do stupid things. Seems like Obama’s mild ribbing a few years ago was the impetus.

This makes him vulnerable to blackmail and other things. It is a huge national security risks and in fact I am pretty sure why the USA was formed in the first place, was in the best interests and security of the citizens.

I don't think he ever thought he would win.

That's almost certainly true, but why risk it in the chance you did win? Your sketchy family business is now under the purview of the public, which is exactly what is happening now.

What evidence is this assertion you and your parent comment are making based on?

Trump's scandals and corruption goes back decades, at least to the 90s. He has clear ties to elements of the criminal world and money laundering enterprises. His business empire shows up in the panama papers.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trum...

You literally shine a light on almost anything he's done and something criminally suspicious shows up. The more you look into it, the more unbelievable it becomes that he isn't knee deep in something illegal.

Exactly what, no one is sure, but if your business empire is run in a shady manner, why on earth would you want to be one of the most scrutinized person on the planet?

Only logical conclusion is that he never intended to win.

Sorry, I wasn't clear; I was asking what the basis was for the assumption both you and your parent comment were making here:

>I don't think [Trump] ever thought he would win [the 2016 US Presidential election].

>That's almost certainly true,

Things like this get tossed around a lot, presumptions about the thought processes of others, specifically public figures. The parent comment to yours at least couched the assertion in an "I think," but you went on to reply, "That's almost certainly true," as though you have some sort of intimate understanding of the President's thought process that the rest of us aren't privy to. I feel that these sort of careless assertions bring down the quality of discourse in general, but here on HN specifically.

It's not really a controversial idea that no one thought Trump was going to win, including himself. Look at the state of his campaign, he didn't even have a cabinet worked out or any kind of transition plan. The first 100 days were a complete mess with people cobbled together from random areas of his life. The Michael Wolff book lays it out pretty clearly about what the thought process was at the time. If you look at the situation, they were not expecting a win at all.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-f...

Not really sure what you're looking for, this is politics not computer science. You'll never get a sigma six answer for any of this. That's about as close as you're going to get in politics for any "fact".

You have an agenda and therefore make statements that pretend to be factual 'well we all know that, don't we?'. Plenty of other places to conduct that game.

I think for anyone who hasn't been hiding under a rock this is pretty well known. There's no real game here, just those who have been paying attention and those who have not.

If any of this comes off as a surprise, I would do more digging into most of this.

Despite you saying "it's an uncontroversial idea" and a book some guy wrote with obvious political intent, I still feel that projecting thoughts and feelings onto someone is dangerous, because it means that my perception of the world is no longer necessarily founded in reality. The more assumptions like this one makes, the further one's own internal reality has the potential of drifting away from those who don't share it.

I've been making an effort to do less and less of this, myself, in the past few years, and I feel that it's helped my perception of reality considerably. For example, I predicted the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election early in the year, while very nearly everyone I knew—even those who supported and voted for Trump!—were sure he would lose. I refused to buy into memes that ascribe intentions or motivations to public figures based on hearsay, and I believe this helped me understand all the crazy shit that went on that year quite a bit better.

Fire and Fury asserts in the first chapter that Trump and just about everyone else involved thought he wouldn’t win, and that Trump himself didn’t want to win. I’m not saying that book is reliable, but you can find a lot of detail there if you want to understand the claim.

Fire and Fury is also almost entirely fiction. The author had no access whatsoever, is known for just making shit up, and has admitted that he made shit up _in this particular book_. Yet some people continue to treat it as a documentary account of some sort.

The word “access” may be some kind of jargon, but many people have confirmed that Michael Wolff was often physically present in the White House. He spoke to Trump and many members of the campaign before and after the election.

Hope Hicks approved his access, and Steve Bannon confirmed much of what he wrote.

Yet the fact remains: he had 12 interactions with campaign staff, just one of which was was with Trump. It lasted 7 minutes. Hardly enough for a substantial book, so the rest of it he basically sucked out of his thumb, including such lurid fantasies as Trump having an affair with Nikki Haley.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

12 interactions? Or 12 lengthy interviews?

Steve Bannon has more incentive than anyone to contest the books accuracy and he’s basically confirmed it.

This is even better.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/steve-bannon-no-reg...

“Bannon said Thursday that his interviews with Wolff were “authorized” by both the White House and outgoing communications director Hope Hicks.

Bannon called a meeting between President Trump's eldest son Donald Jr. and a Russian lawyer "treasonous" in Wolff's book. “I haven’t seen anybody refute anything that was said in the book,” Bannon said.”

All the right people hate Trump. It's as asset to him. He clearly courts and benefits from the silly moral outrage peddled against him. The same people outraged by Trump's consensual sex advocate every conceivable form of sexual deviance, oppose public exposure to the Ten Commandments, embrace and promote Islam, and they outright despise Middle America, our culture, values, and us as human beings. The arbiters of tolerance have less than none for Trump or anything he does, nor do they tolerate his supporters. This creates division, cleaving off such a large portion of the electorate that Trump became president simply by painting himself as a regular Joe billionaire who is oppressed by the left. That's why he thought it would be a good idea to run. That's why he won. Because of the closed-minded bigotry of supercilious coastal elites incapable of seeing past their self-congratulatory narcissism. I.E., exactly the attitude you are expressing. I don't mean that as an insult - I want you to understand the dynamics at play. This is how Trump's supporters feel.

I wasn't questioning his election. But if you have a history of shady business deals and long standing connections to less than scrupulous elements of the business world, why on earth you want to be President? It's the most scrutinized position in the world. Once you become President everyone watches your move with a microscope.

For someone like Trump, who has a history of sketchy finances and dubious business practices, it seems attracting attention and investigation is the last thing you'd want.

I guess critical thinking is "elitist self-congratulatory narcissism"? /s

I also think it's funny that your post blasted the liberal arrogance in the most arrogant churlish way possible. Basically disproving your entire point. Nice to know that California doesn't have the condescending asshole market completely cornered ;)

Our discussion is centered around perception and semiotics. How is it that Trump benefits from what you perceive as a liability? To you, his past dealings and the controversy surrounding him communicate that he should not be President of the United States. Yet, these dealings and this controversy are viewed by his base as bona fides. Applying critical thinking this problem is difficult when the concept of critical thinking itself has been abducted to mean "conclusion: Trump is bad". Diversity of thought, empathy, and dignity are not afforded to Trump supporters by the left. It certainly goes both ways, as can be seen by the degree to which his supporters support him out of spite for leftist orthodoxy. The complaint that the left heaps praise on Islam and non-European culture while denegrating Christianity and European culture is very real, and there is much to convince Trump supporters of this. Trump goes far out of his way to cause multiculturalist backers of tolerance and empathy to treat his supporters with disrespect, judgement, and complete lack of empathy. Rather than fretting about who is an asshole and who is good and just, I seek to understand what is happening and why.

These two things are very different:

>why on earth you want to be President?

>he should not be President of the United States

>The same people outraged by Trump's consensual sex advocate every conceivable form of sexual deviance, oppose public exposure to the Ten Commandments, embrace and promote Islam, and they outright despise Middle America, our culture, values, and us as human beings.

>That's why he won. Because of the closed-minded bigotry of supercilious coastal elites incapable of seeing past their self-congratulatory narcissism

My. Given such a reasonable attitude and understanding of liberals and the left, and non-Christians, and non-heterosexuals, and literally anyone not like themselves, I honestly can't imagine why Trump's supporters get treated with disrespect.

This is cute but ultimately pointless. Trump has survived sharing classified information with Russia. Fucking a porn star and paying her off isn’t going to really cause any problems for him. And Jeff Sessions certainly won’t indict him.

Well, isn't Trump the Commander in chief? That means that he absolutely gets to decide what classified material can be shared with whomever and it's not illegal if he does it, regardless of whether it's a dumb move.

He can give away all our secrets and it isn't illegal.

I’m talking about political survival, not legal.

Then why the remark about Sessions not indicting Trump for it?

TL;DR FEC Data proves Trump laundered money to pay off Stormy Daniels. The odds it's a coincidence are 8,000,000 to 1.

I guess I don't understand; is any of this actually illegal?

Yes.

[1] Campaign finance law, from the FEC:

> Using campaign funds for personal use is prohibited.

> Commission regulations provide a test, called the “irrespective test,” to differentiate legitimate campaign and officeholder expenses from personal expenses. Under the “irrespective test,” personal use is any use of funds in a campaign account of a candidate (or former candidate) to fulfill a commitment, obligation or expense of any person that would exist irrespective of the candidate’s campaign or responsibilities as a federal officeholder.

> More simply, if the expense would exist even in the absence of the candidacy or even if the officeholder were not in office, then the personal use ban applies.

[1] https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making-di...

This still seems inconclusive to me. I'm no lawyer, but why would Trump want to pay for this porn star's silence unless he became a Presidential candidate?

...and it's flagged...

Given the math, code and relation to finances should this be flagged? The nature of the gist is hacker worthy.

I don't think it should be, but I'm not at all surprised that it is (and I don't think it's mostly partisan, though there's probably some of that.)

I suspect the flags are due to the anticipation or evidence of the resulting HN discussion, regardless of the worthiness of the submission itself: of the 20 comments (including the dead), only three are about the submission itself. That's a pretty low signal-to-noise ratio.

I really think it's just an indication of the flagging dynamic. If 20% flags vs upvotes kills an article, all "partisan" articles will be killed.

Though I'm personally more interested in this as an article of criminal justice. I mean, most of the times I chafe at "X million to 1" statistical stories, because they're sometimes the kind of bullshit used to railroad defendants, but I do wish we had some discussion.

I mean, many there's an honest explanation for payments grouping together to almost equal an even tens of thousands of dollars? I'm not being sarcastic. I want that discussion, I want to be exposed to that potential counterpoint.

> "I really think it's just an indication of the flagging dynamic. If 20% flags vs upvotes kills an article, all "partisan" articles will be killed."

I'm speaking of what motivates people to choose to click flag as opposed to upvote or just leave it alone. That's different from the effect those flags have on the submission.

Yeah, this shouldn't be flagged IMO. I don't see how it breaks HN guidelines - it simply finds evidence (albeit far from conclusive) for something many HN readers may wish weren't true.

I’ve noticed a lot of posts like this disappear from the front page lately. Anything potentially critical of Trump seems to drop off suddenly.

There's a very strong tendency on HN to flag submissions whose subject is strongly tied to partisan politics, except for tech policy issues or issues concerning tech industry figures.

I flag them even though I don't like Trump often because the posts (and comments) are often poor quality and political news is already ubiquitous pretty much everywhere else on the Internet so I don't feel bad being a little stricter on it here.

Interestingly, "most stories about politics" is one of the example of off-topic in the guidelines so I think there is just a general sentiment against political news here

I don’t think that’s appropriate in a criminal light. It’s ok to say a site is politics free, but evidence of crime shouldn’t be surpressed. Particularly not when the evidence is documented with technological steps. At that point it’s definiely HN worthy.

Further, I didn’t see the HN post about a block chain being used in a voting process flagged.

Only if Stormy accepted AMEX's card processing fees.

Can't wait to see the trial that never happens and the protests that never go anywhere.

Just ignore the facts they had to round up. /s

They do say within $1.

But yea it's a little weird to attempt to cover your tracks and then only vary the total by 28 cents.

Clearly it’s enough to fool the people who want to be fooled, ie, the person you’re responding to.

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