Of course she was. Everyone in Biden's orbit knew, as Clinton's Chinese Connection "fundraiser" Jonny Chung said of Democrat Party politics, "to ride the subway, you have to put the coins into the machine."
The basics are that Kamala Harris offered $1000 to a Beau Biden "charity" for its email list, which she would then exploit, hitting up donors for political donations to her campaigns.
The "charity" also offered Kamala a board seat after she offered that $1000 "donation." Obviously, it wasn't a donation, it was a payment for the email list.
I don't think this story will have much impact. It's pretty inside-baseball and relies on knowing, and caring about, federal election law and exempt "charities" law. The money Kamala Harris demanded from the charity, in exchange from her email list, was never actually paid, so there was no crime.
Well, I guess a Bragg-style political prosecutor could claim that by asking for a charity to make an illegal payment, Kamala Harris entered into a conspiracy to violate the law of charities, and a Merchan-style judge would approve of the charges.
Still, it all has a bad smell.
Like Kamala.
Allegedly.
Allies of Joe Biden were skeptical that Kamala Harris was "ready" for the national spotlight during her 2016 US Senate campaign -- but were apparently happy to hand over donor lists and even offer her a board seat with the Beau Biden Foundation after her camp dangled a $1,000 contribution, emails on first son Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop show.
If completed, the convoluted transaction flouted the Foundation's tax-exempt status and may have violated federal election law, experts told The Post this week.
Allies of Harris, then California's attorney general, contacted Josh Alcorn, Beau Biden's top political and fundraising adviser, with an unusual request in late 2015 -- months after the former Delaware attorney general died of brain cancer.
"Just an FYI -- Kamala Harris's campaign reached out. They'd like to pay us about $1,000 for access to the email list," Alcorn wrote in a December 30 email to Hunter and Hallie Biden, Beau's widow.
"The money would go to the [Beau Biden] campaign, then be transferred to the foundation," explained Alcorn, who ran the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children from January 2016 to June 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Why are they offering to give it to his political campaign, instructing him then to shift the payment to the "charity"?
Because she knew what she was doing was illegal, so she was telling him to use the money as slush-money funds to be moved around to avoid the law.
"Seems like a good thing to do, and we would work out a way to get some names and emails from her once her general election is over," he added. "This isn't a foundation issue -- just a campaign wrap up issue. If either of you have objections, let me know."
On Jan. 12, 2016, just under two weeks after that exchange, Alcorn floated Harris as a proposed addition to the foundation's board.
The email exchange ended with Alcorn informing Hunter Biden that he will "try to schedule the call with AG Harris."
Three former members of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) told The Post that donor list swaps are common and legal among campaigns, as long as each pays fair market rate.
But funneling the Harris payment to the foundation in exchange for the donor list -- after the Biden family made clear months earlier that Beau's campaign funds would be donated to the foundation -- would have been a different matter.
"Charitable organizations are not supposed to be involved in transactions with partisan campaign committees," said Michael Toner, who served as FEC chairman in 2006 and as a commissioner between 2002 and 2007.
"If ... the foundation had used that donor list and they'd raised $100,000 and they're giving that donor list to Kamala Harris' campaign" for $1,000, explained former FEC commissioner Hans von Spakovsky, who served from 2006 to 2007, "they've gone way over the amount of money that can be contributed."
"They're not charging the fair market value and that's the way the FEC looks at things like this," he added, pointing out that there is currently a $2,000 cap on the amount that campaigns can contribute to other campaigns.
"The fair market value of Campaign A's list, which it gives to Campaign B, is worth $1,000. That is OK because it is still within the $2,000 limit," von Spakovsky went on. "But assume that the value of Campaign B's donor list is $4,000. They have just swapped lists. This was an uneven exchange, resulting in Campaign B making a $3,000 contribution to Campaign A, which is illegal because it violates the $2,000 contribution limit."
If the donor list came from the foundation itself, he said, that would also amount to "an illegal corporate contribution."
Just an endless daisy-chain of back-washing, beak-dipping, favor-trading, and corruption, really.