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Comment by hurin | Hacker News Reader

What's the actual legal status on this?

It definitely seems to circumvent the law - but is it clearly criminal? Have such abuses been prosecuted successfully in the past?

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See “conduit contribution”: "Here’s how a “conduit contribution” works. Person A wants to give a lot of money to Candidate X. But federal law puts a ceiling on how much one person can contribute to a candidate. To get around the law, Person A goes to Friend B or Employee C or Associate D and says, “Hey, if you give me the money for Candidate X, I’ll pass along your check and then reimburse you out of my own pocket or from corporate funds.” The friend, employee, or associate effectively becomes a “conduit” for the real contributor, thus the name."

"The law is clear: Under the Federal Election Campaign Act, making campaign contributions in the name of another person or otherwise concealing the true source of the funds is a felony if the contribution exceeds $2,000. In fact, both the person soliciting the contribution and the person who agrees to be reimbursed for it could be investigated. Even if neither is aware of the law."

source: http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2007/december/electfraud_121...

Nowhere in these emails does it say that Sony is reimbursing the execs for their contributions. If anything, the reluctance of having to ask execs to contribute indicates that they are not doing that.

My post was answering a question. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393256

>>"What's the actual legal status on this? It definitely seems to circumvent the law - but is it clearly criminal?"

The email indicates that they were planning to structure their donations "by making this a focus of our individual giving from execs" ie: 'fundraising'.

>>"$50k is a heavy lift since most of it needs to come from individual contributions (only $5k can come from corp.), but I recommend we do it. Cuomo has been a strong protector of the film incentive – even amidst recent criticisms of the program. Also, given the shows we’ve got there and your relationships I think it would look a bit odd if you weren’t on the host committee."

>>"I think we can get to the 50k commitment by making this a focus of our individual giving from execs this year (versus the federal PAC)."

If you want to argue about what "fundraising" means in this context, be my guest; but, I've probably heard it before, and I'll probably think you're either naive or deliberately obtuse. Are you expecting a single email that perfectly implicates the entire board of a multinational corp. in a crime? Do you expect a contract for illegal services to be included as an attachment or something?

It's quite obvious what they're doing, but being blind to nuance and expecting powerful people to be acting in good faith in the face of contradictory evidence go hand in hand.

I don't see how it's fundamentally any different from a pro-life group wanting to donate to a pro-life candidate and then celebrating the passage of a pro-life law. Of course you want to support candidates who look after your interests. As long as there is no quid pro quo (e.g. the $50k was a fee for passing the initiative and it wouldn't have happened otherwise). IANAL.

There are limitations on donations. They wanted to donate $50k. By law, they can't do that. So they manipulated how they donated that sum to circumvent that law.

But it's not quite the same as sony still giving it up. Their execs had to pay out of their own pocket.

I'm actually glad to see that they cared about the law at all, and there was some level of effectiveness to it!

Nonsense. They didn't "manipulate" anything. The company made a legal donation and they asked employees to make additional donations up to a certain target amount from the employee's own funds.

It's perfectly legal to email your coworkers about a political campaign and to ask them to donate. Does this kind of suck? Maybe. Is campaign finance a mess? Definitely. But would you really want a federal law that restricts what you can say about political campaigns while at work? I'm not even sure the Constitution would permit such a restriction on speech.

To quote the email:

because we need your help.

we have a great production incentive environment in NY

Because of all of this, I think it’s important to significantly support his reelection efforts and NY law only allows corporations to give him $5,000

we are trying to raise $50k overall.

Like I said, I'm not sure where this falls on the legal-side of things, but this clearly goes further than merely:

> It's perfectly legal to email your coworkers about a political campaign and to ask them to donate.

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree. I would guess Sony executives and the Sony Corporation have closely aligned financial incentives. It's perfectly reasonable for them to want to spend personal funds on the campaigns that Sony Corp thinks are important. We can't restrict corporate employees from spending their own money any more than we restrict the general public. Nor can (or should) we restrict what you're allowed to say to coworkers about a political campaign.

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