Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is over, but Trumpworld isn’t out of the legal woods yet. Campaign-finance watchdogs say Mueller’s report, released Thursday, is all the evidence federal regulators need to levy penalties against the president’s political apparatus.
Mueller declined to bring charges against two key figures in the president’s orbit, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, over allegations they illegally solicited foreign campaign contributions at an infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower. But Mueller presented enough evidence of a violation, says Craig Holman, a government-affairs lobbyist for the group Public Citizen, for the Federal Election Commission to bring civil charges against the Trump campaign.