REUTERS
“The Labour Party apparently wants a like-minded US president.”
That’s how Susie Wiles, one of Donald Trump’s chief lieutenants, in exclusive comments to The Post explains the motivations for what the GOP campaign sees as Brits’ foreign election interference on behalf of Kamala Harris in the presidential contest’s final stretch in the swing states.
In a complaint to the Federal Election Commission, the Trump camp alleges “sufficient evidence to support a reason to believe finding that the British Labour Party made, and the Harris campaign accepted, illegal foreign national contributions,” as well as “reason to believe that foreign nationals are exercising direction and control over elements of the Harris campaign” — especially given the “similarity in messaging between the Harris campaign and the Labour Party supports a reasonable inference that this advice is influencing campaign messaging and resource allocation.”
“The flailing Harris-Walz campaign is seeking foreign influence to boost its radical message — because they know they can’t win the American people,” Wiles said in announcing the complaint. “The Harris campaign’s acceptance and use of this illegal foreign assistance is just another feeble attempt in a long line of anti-American election interference.”
In the wake of Labour Head of Operations Sofia Patel soliciting Britons to invade American battleground states — including North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and (for whatever reason) Virginia — to rock the vote for the party’s preferred candidate with promises to “sort your housing” stateside and presumably pay travel costs, the Trump campaign is unleashing legal eagles on the transoceanic vote-harvesting scheme.
Campaign deputy counsel Gary Lawkowski of the Dhillon Law Group’s complaint to FEC acting general counsel Lisa Stevenson itemizes the Trump camp’s pique over the perfidious plan as lawyers “request an immediate investigation into blatant foreign interference in the 2024 Presidential Election in the form of apparent illegal foreign national contributions made by the Labour Party of the United Kingdom and accepted by Harris for President.”
Patel removed her LinkedIn post and nuked her whole profile in the process, as the British Ayes to the Right website noted. But burying the evidence of the sinister scheme to “show the Yanks how we win elections” doesn’t remedy the wrongdoing, especially given the social-media solicitation is part of a pattern of questionable coordination.
Lawkowski alleges the Harris campaign has been “borrowing language and themes” from the Labour Party in a manner reminiscent of Plagiarist in Chief Joe Biden’s long-ago tribute to bygone British lefty Neil Kinnock, remixing Orwellian “Nineteen Eighty-Four”-style phrases like “Stop the chaos” and “Turn the page” into “We’re not going back” and “It’s time to turn the page.”
And key strategists for Prime Minister Keir Starmer have flown to the states to explain to Harris’ team how Labour pulled off its triumph in this year’s elections, with meetings everywhere from the nation’s capital to the Democratic National Convention. And Starmer and Biden dined together in recent weeks.
The law is clear, Lawkowski argues.
“Foreign nationals are prohibited from ‘directly or indirectly’ making ‘a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election’ or an independent expenditure in support of a U.S. candidate,” his complaint contends.