Omarosa

Nice dodge Mark....PJ must be seeing a whole bunch of commie psychiatrists.  Logic just escapes these two.  Lol, you've got SIX MORE YEARS of dealing with your obvious psychosis.  Hope you can enjoy these years half as much as I will.

David, it's just another Liberal double standard.  Hillary never met with the Russians, although they sent her millions of dollars in regurn for uranium.  The Libs were outradged.

1.  Real wages wouldn't be down right now as she wanted to raise the minimum wage. - Wages went down under Obama, without even accounting for inflation.   

2.  The federal deficit wouldn't have exploded to lavish a massive tax cut on the top 1% and corporations. From the guy who supported blowing $10 trillion with little benefit to the economy

3.  We wouldn't have given up a working agreement with Iran only to give away the farm to North Korea in exchange for nothing. We were allowing Iran to build nuclear weapons, nothing has been settled with N Korea

4.  We wouldn't have members of the President's inner circle and family who have pled guilty, are on or awaiting trial and are under investigation - Not a single indictment for collusion or obstruction in over 2 years

1.  Real wages wouldn't be down right now as she wanted to raise the minimum wage. - Wages went down under Obama, without even accounting for inflation.   

2.  The federal deficit wouldn't have exploded to lavish a massive tax cut on the top 1% and corporations. From the guy who supported blowing $10 trillion with little benefit to the economy

3.  We wouldn't have given up a working agreement with Iran only to give away the farm to North Korea in exchange for nothing. We were allowing Iran to build nuclear weapons, nothing has been settled with N Korea

4.  We wouldn't have members of the President's inner circle and family who have pled guilty, are on or awaiting trial and are under investigation - Not a single indictment for collusion or obstruction in over 2 years

Does anyone know the legal term for meeting with Russian operatives on the specific topic of gathering information about your political opponent?    

Ask Hillary, since it was her people involved in the Steele dossier, that the Justice dept won’t release info on. 

Oh, right, the Steele Dossier.   The one funded by Republicans, Democrats and the Deep State FBI....where they hired a US firm that gathered intelligence from a British civilian.    See!   Same thing as Russia!  

So anyway -

Does anyone know the legal term for meeting with Russian government operatives on the specific topic of gathering information about your political opponent? 

DonDiego opines the appropriate term is "opposition research".

See the Washington Post article: "Can it be a crime to do opposition research by asking foreigners for information?"  by Eugene Volokh for one man's legal analysis.

Basically he presents lots of hypothetical situations which suggest suppression of such communication with foreigners is not and should not be illegal.

He also provides some legal case-references which suggest the First Amendment insures such information may well be Constitutionally protected.

Mr. Volokh's conclusion: "I'm inclined to think that even a narrow statute barring American campaigns from receiving 'very high level and sensitive information' from foreign governments would be unconstitutional."

i.e. It is not illegal.

n.b.

i. Mr. Volokh's article pertained to defending the Clinton campaign obtaining information about Mr. Trump; DonDiego assumes the same arguments apply to either side of the campaign. 

ii. DonDiego would provide a link but apparently if one gets to the Washington Post through another site's link and is not a Washington Post subscriber one cannot see the internet address.

 October 2015, private investigative firm Fusion GPS was contracted by conservative political website,  The Washington Free Beason to provide political research against Trump. In April 2016, attorney, Marc Elais (the lawyer for Clinton’s 2016 campaign) separately hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump on behalf of Hillary clinton’s campaign and the DNC.  The Free Beacon stopped their backing when Trump became the Republican presidential nominee.   

In June 2016, Fusion GPS subcontracted Steele's firm to compile the dossier. His instructions were to seek answers to why Trump would "repeatedly seek to do deals in with corrupt govt.  Clinton campaign officials were reportedly unaware that Fusion GPS had subcontracted Steele, and he was not told the Clinton campaign was the recipient of his research.  (How could the Clinton campaign not know, when Steele was hired by their attorney?)

Following Trump's election as president, funding from Clinton and the DNC ceased.  However Bruce Ohr (whose wife was employed by fusion) kept it alive

It is a  poor hypothetical for a couple of reasons.

1.  If someone gives you something of value in furtherance of your campaign for elected office, it is illegal if you don't report it on your campaign finance disclosures.  This is what they prosecuted John Edwards for and he was facing quite a bit of jail time in Federal Prison. So even if the underlying act is legal, not disclosing it isn't an option.  That said this is a relatively small problem compared to problem number two.

2.  If the "opposition research" was obtained through a crime (hacking) and you partake in the fruits of that crime or directly participate in the crime by providing instructions to those committing the crime, you are part of a criminal conspiracy and can be charged with the same crimes as those who actually committed the acts. Trump publically asked (Russia if your listening...) to hack Hillary's emails which is a crime. That evening they proceded to start hacking Hillary's emails. It appears members of the Trump campaign coordinated the release of the stolen emails obtained by Russian intelligence agents though Wikileaks and their analytics firm.  It also appears that Trump himself knew of this as he made more than one statement urging his followers to watch WikiLeaks for new information that was about to come out.