Sounds an awful lot like a campaign finance violation?

Bloomberg bows out of presidential contest but his money will stay

After a not-so-Super Tuesday, Michael Bloomberg is out of the presidential nomination contest. But the power of his $60 billion fortune is staying in.

Bloomberg on Wednesday switched from being a candidate to being a powerful backer of former Vice President Joe Biden, who dominated March 3 Super Tuesday voting in the race to challenge President Donald Trump in the Nov. 3 election.

I hate to point out the obvious, but while self-funding a campaign is perfectly legal, someone is only allowed to give, um... a couple thousand in cash or other "things of value" to a campaign? The idea that mini-Mike Bloomberg has the ability to use his fortune to fund Biden's campaign is quite obviously a violation of every campaign norm and law that exists.

Interesting how liberals demanded that a non-disclosure agreement was a campaign finance violation of some sort the should have put multiple people behind bars (because it violated the acceptable limits of what can be given), but these same people seem perfectly okay with the idea of Biden and Bloomberg coordinating as to how best to use the infrastructure and resources Bloomberg has available.

To be clear, Bloomberg can spend unlimited money on an "issue campaign". But he cannot spend more than a few thousand dollars on any sort of coordinated effort with a Party or candidate. Let's be realistic here. There is going to be a pretty low bar when it comes to the laws of diminishing returns on flooding the airwaves with gun law or abortion rights advertising.

It was not immediately clear how Bloomberg would support Biden. When asked what the support will look like, an official in Bloomberg’s former campaign pointed to his past pledge to keep campaign infrastructure in place through November to help Democrats defeat Trump.

Bloomberg addressed a crowd of supporters in New York, thanking his staff for their efforts but providing no details on how he would spend his money.

Biden’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said it wasn’t clear how Biden’s campaign will work with Bloomberg. “All of those details are still to be worked out,” she said on a call with reporters.

It feels like we have all entered some sort of alternate reality where nobody really understands that it's illegal for "all" rich people (not just rich Republicans) to just provide funds directly to a political party or political candidate. Certainly Bloomberg can fund a super-pac, bundle money and do some other things like the before-mentioned . But he cannot legally just spend $100's of millions of dollars out of his pocket running a shadow campaign on behalf of another candidate. Moreover, if I was Joe Biden, I might wonder out loud if I wanted Mike Bloomberg's help!

It feels a little like collective amnesia about how much liberals cared about campaign finance violations that they felt altered the 2016 election and how it seems that this "blatant" over the top idea of just providing hundreds of millions in campaign support to Biden is being talked about without any suggestion as to how this remains within the law?

It will be interesting to people applaud Mike Bloomberg spending hundreds of millions, while forgetting that they once demanded that people be put in prison over a $130,000 non-disclosure agreement... because it was "too much money" for one person to be spending on a Campaign. Or how they supported a 35 million dollar investigation into oddly defined "things of value" and $100,000 in social media advertising, because those sorts of violations of campaign laws were a threat to our Democracy.

Reconcile that?

Steal a little and they throw you in jail... steal a lot and they make you king!