Why the new Omarosa tape could send Lara Trump to prison
When Omarosa released a new secret recording today, some were disappointed that Donald Trump wasn’t on it. Instead the recording consisted of Eric Trump’s wife Lara Trump offering Omarosa a high paying job with the Trump 2020 reelection campaign, after she’d been fired from her White House job, in order to keep her quiet. This is clearly unethical, and embarrassing for the Trump regime. But it also may have just sent Lara Trump to prison.
The thing about bribery is that it tends to be legal, unless there’s a specific criminal element involved. For instance, in general it’s legal to pay someone to keep quiet about an affair you’ve had with them. But when Donald Trump and Michael Cohen decided to pay Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal to keep quiet about their affairs with Trump, that was a violation of federal election laws because Trump was running for president at the time.
This brings us to the matter of Lara Trump. Here’s what she said to Omarosa while offering to hire her for the 2020 campaign: “It sounds a little like, obviously, that there are some things you’ve got in the back pocket to pull out. Clearly, if you come on board the campaign, like, we can’t have, we got to…” before Omarosa jumps in and agrees. It’s clear here that Omarosa was being offered the high paying job specifically in exchange for not releasing whatever disparaging material she had on Trump. So that’s a bribe – and that bribe was being made with campaign funds.
Donald Trump’s payoffs to his mistresses didn’t even involve campaign funds, yet the law still views them as an illegal campaign contribution. Donald Trump was paying his mistresses to keep quiet in a way that would benefit his campaign, thus the payments he made were technically donations to his own campaign. In this instance, Lara Trump was indeed trying to bribe Omarosa with campaign funds, at a time when Donald Trump has made clear that he’s actively and officially campaigning for the 2020 election.
In the end, our interpretation of the law doesn’t matter here; it only matters how a prosecutor, a judge, and a jury might interpret it. But if this does end up being seen as a bribe involving campaign funds, then Lara Trump is looking at prison time. So is anyone else involved with the Trump 2020 reelection campaign who conspired with her on this, whether it be her husband Eric Trump, or her father-in-law Donald Trump.
