to family members friends and employees of the winfield the vatican and when you say unconditional what do you mean the evidence seems to me clearly the show he made these payments with the expectation that the money would be contributed and of course the expectation was will help well we would suggest that he what the evidence shows is that he certainly had the hope and the desire that the contributions be made but he relinquished abdicated all control suggests that he had a fair amount of control over these people and he gave them money with the expectation that will be passed on as a political contribution in their name and that's exactly what happened but there's no evidence that he controlled the disposition of hopi may have had as to what would happen with that money but that doesn't mean that the gift was for that purpose now that's what has to be there for that if you so tell me exactly what it is the instruction that the jury should part of the don't or to control or prevent age of subsequent just position of the funds and it should have been instructed that by virtue of an unconditional gift there is an immediate contributor right was not in fact the true source of the money so you see that that completely in congress is your theory you just articulated about the conditional why am i wrong on that well because the jury one of the elements of the offense the jury had to find in order to convict and so if they believed right that the money was in fact unconditionally given to the don't the recipients then it was their money and they could find that the true source of the money wasn't fact your client who we were not permitted to argue that the money was unconditionally given we were not permitted to argue we were forbidden from making that argument by the district court the just record council only to argue to the jury what is and i quote a common understanding of the word gift we were prohibited from distinguishing conditional from unconditional gifts and our instructions would have made that distinction as would we  argument but we couldn't do that so the jury had no legal framework no wherewithal with which to make a determination the difference between a gift that has a particular purpose and therefore  from a gift that has no purpose that is unconditional surrender all control revocable each of the dony and therefore is no hold on so then on the next page on one fifty two again this is just a continuation the jury had to find that the money was given to the recipient for the purpose of causing that other person to make a contribution in that other person's name again it just to mean they were told that they had to reject that theory revocable don't of intense is inconsistent with a criminal intent that determination of purpose or criminal intent was not adequately informed by instruction that is our argument i hear the argument let me come back to the a precise definition of gift yes or what the word gift is here i think the ordinary understanding of a gift yes i give it to you it's yours well you are in order for a gift i would but other than that they were overwhelming weight of the evidence was he told me it's a gift he told me it's completely voluntary i could have kept it for a vacation i could have done whatever i wanted with that  challenge the government's theory was to be able to have the jury evaluate doma truth intense and unconditional gift and they should have been allowed to consider that it's possible your honor for a series of unconditional gifts to if the jury was properly instructed us to unconditional gifts they would have seen that he advocated and subjected himself to frustration well you know i think the crime is from lead if he gives it to them with the purpose of the contribution but mr wood moore's mere hope and desire could easily be confused with what the statute requires to be a legal purpose of the transfer from him to the extent that the transfer from him has no designit no just admitted purpose to the extent that we are not talking about replacing designated dollars for designated dollars then we are not implicated section four for one half what we have then simply would be analogous to an employer paying an employee his paycheck and at the same time advocating support for particular care financial support for a particular candidate the money is belongs to the employee or the employee who has furnished she can do so appropriate legal manner if they are not aware of the fact that an unconditional gift renders immediate divestiture of the former source of the money as the contemporaneous owner at the time of the contribution that's the same thing as a paycheck right but you know and and the reason why you would need an instruction telling a jury hey when someone pays you a paycheck it becomes your money right the same thing with me injuries understand if your theory of the defense was that this was an unconditional gift and the money therefore became the recipient no strings attached then they would have acquitted under this instruction but the but the average person not trained in law does not understand that not all gifts are created equal and there are some gifts and then there are others i mean unconditional gift is in cisterns with the purpose of all done all in this century but the question under the  an unconditional one now i answered i don't mean to quibble over semantics but i do i do suggest that there's a difference between mr winter more's desire and the purpose of the transfer conclusion we don't think that that was true we think that order should be treated as a final order because the only change in circumstance was that mr wizard more did not take the because it was deprived of the opportunity to demonstrate for the jury that his belief as reflected in the evidence was an objectively reasonable belief there's a we would suggest a direct correlation between objective reasonable i see my chimes in more and more questions on the bench at this time we've taken you over but we will give you a chance to respond thank you so much candidate for federal office and then furnishes the money for that contribution and that is exactly what happened here the defendant promised united states senator that he raised one hundred fifty thousand for the senator's campaign by march thirty first on march who were single got five thousand dollars those who were married got ten thousand dollars these were all people who were financially to tell on the defendant they were his relatives his children people who worked at the company that he ran everyone from h secretary to the c f o of the firm to the maintenance man at the golf course every single one of these people turned around mostly most of them on the very same day a couple of them the next day and made maximum contributions to reelection campaign that people who got five thousand wrote checks for forty six hundred pocketed the four hundred dollars difference those who were married only those who were married or engaged got checks for ten thousand and those people both they and their spouse or partner wrote forty six hundred dollars checks for a total of ninety two hundred pocketing the eight hundred dollars difference and i think what we what we've heard here today and the briefing and in the just report the pretrial briefing you know what we have right but but that unconditional meaning and absolute transfer of legal ownership right there is another definition of unconditional that most of us would use common sense normal conversation which means no strings attached right you give someone still control the money once you give the gift it's theirs and they can do what you wanted them to do with it or not it's theirs but the fact that you don't have legal control over it anymore doesn't negate the fact that you gave it with a particular  guest where i give you this i mean if i get if i give my adult child money because i know that she needs a car and so i say here i know you need a car let me give you this money right i'm not going to write out a contract that says and you have to give it back to me and such and what you really want to she wanted to come home for christmas there's that that you know you're going to start now we have another purpose but if she if she whether she uses that money to buy a car not doesn't negate the fact that that was the purpose now in this case the jury was properly instructed that in order to find the defendant guilty they had to find that he when he sat down and wrote out these hundred forty five thousand dollars worth of checks and on march twenty seventh four days before the deadline and he gave them to these people he gave them with the purpose of funding their contributions of routing that money to the senator's reelection campaign and that is exactly what happened and i'm right in reading the statute is person who got the gifts and thanks very much wanted to mexico and i mean as we as we presented at trial i mean we don't think that there was any coincidence that he chose people who are financially dependent on him i mean yes the maintenance guy at the golf course who was was the crime committed when the conduit made the donation to the john edwards campaign knowing that the defendant had promised to reimburse or was the crime not complete until the defendant reimbursed saying if the if the reimbursement doesn't come for many many months later or you know it's depending on on the amount of time there could be you know this could raise some real questions about when did the crime actually occur campaign but again in this particular case of course almost all of this conduct happened within a few hours and or at most within a day i mean you know these checks were all written on the twenty seventh they were all the checks from the people to  campaign were all day that the twenty seventh or twenty eighth with one exception they were transferred to the senator's campaign by fax on the twentieth so so that's an interesting question which is for another case i would say i think your your honour's right but certainly we don't have to reach out on the reasons of just wardlaw suggested i think we're never going to see exactly and and you know on the other thing is it's like so yes i put a footnote and i hope it wasn't i didn't mean to be snarky with this footnote in our brief about but what was happening was absolutely clear this defendant made one hundred forty five thousand dollars checks to people for the purpose of turning around and making and transferring that money to the great campaign and in order to convict him the jury had to find not only that that the defendant made those wrote those checks with the purpose of funding donations to the raid campaign but that he knew that it was unlawful to do so and so and so this wasn't  the jury was instructed was given the willfully instruction the willfulness instruction from brian and needed to you know the government needed to prove that he knew that he acted with some knowledge that his conduct was unlawful and with the purpose of doing  and the letters and everything right there and then we interviewed them we then we then there was a grand jury with the witnesses yeah i don't know if you want me to discuss any of the other things the constitutional challenge plea you know in this case it was a lot of money and right up until the sentencing hearing he was saying you know apparently you know i thought this was legal and apparently the jury disagreed but you know the jury thinks i was mistaken and you know when the prosecutor relevant or important but what the government argued in our brief is that this testimony was irrelevant because there is simply no evidence at trial about what the defendant subjective funds because of that you know it's a far cry from the sort of thing that the statute designed to prevent which is one person managing to evade the limits and with his own money  the last thing i want to say is that the court's interpretation as to whether or not an actual contribution needs to be made to the extent that i did perhaps earlier to have considered the point i do not reconsideration that it occurred to me t embarrassment situation must actually be followed through on so the and that's clear from o'donnell so the contribution necessarily has to have been made by the actual the name contributor in order for