Is it just disingenuous, or is it actually incorrect? Is journalism just politics by another name? If so, is that inherently the case, or just contingently the case in the modern US? This is an interesting claim (if it is your claim); my initial reaction is to disagree, but I acknowledge that there’s a lot of grey in the distinction.
If someone told the Trump campaign that they were going to do something illegal for the benefit of the campaign, and the campaign received the spoils of that illegal act, that would be more than just a failure to report a crime, it’s complicity. Given that senior members of the Trump campaign were in contact with people offering them the spoils of a criminal hack, it’s not impossible, it’s not even that much of a stretch that Trump himself knew about it.
Another point of moral clarification: If you know someone is going to hack into someone’s email for your benefit, do you have a moral obligation to take steps to prevent them from doing so?
I am a lawyer.
Doesn’t this answer your point? Again, there are First Amendment exceptions throughout criminal law. Even when they aren’t there expressly, they’ll be read in by courts to save the law from being unconstitutional. There’s a rule of statutory construction in the US that says, where possible, courts should avoid interpretations that would render a statute unconstitutional.
Here “contribution or donation of money or other thing of value” is ambiguous, but easily interpretable to exclude stump speeches in support of a candidate, but not exclude e.g. material support in the form of the spoils of criminal hacking.
If “dirt on Trump” includes dirt on any more senior member of the campaign, or a promise to testify to what he does know, etc., that’s how I understand it as well. The fact that Flynn and Papadopolous entered these plea agreements, that Papadopolous’ agreement was entered under seal, and that neither has been sentenced and likely won’t be sentenced until the investigation is complete, suggests strongly that that’s what we have. The written agreement makes it pretty clear that that’s what the investigators believe they have. Whether or not Flynn or Papadopolous are in fact able to provide what investigators seem to expect them to provide remains to be seen, but it is a reasonable conclusion from what we do know.