<p>Talk about legal scholarship on the cutting edge of current events!</p>
<p>Widener University Commonwealth Law School professor Michael R. Dimino is a co-author of "The Mueller Investigation and Beyond," published last fall by the Carolina Academic Press.</p>
<p>The book was conceived before the much-anticipated Mueller Report was even released.</p>
<p>Lead author Ellen S. Podgor contacted Dimino last March, one month before the Mueller Report was made public, and asked him to contribute a chapter that would analyze election-law issues in the Report.</p>
<p>Only Podgor needed it fast in order to teach a late fall semester short course on the elements of the Mueller Report.</p>
<p>Dimino rose to the challenge and met the August deadline with a chapter on two key issues of election law related to the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.</p>
<p>&ldquo;It was such a fun subject, diving into an area of specialty for me,&rdquo; said Dimino, adding he was flattered to be asked to be a contributor. &ldquo;I wrote mostly on explaining the law and the Mueller report&rsquo;s conclusions.&nbsp; I included the statutes and the regulations, and explained the arguments that could be made. The idea was to let students decide, after making sure that they understood the facts and the background law.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Dimino examined issues surrounding the so-called &ldquo;Trump Tower&rdquo; meeting that took place in June 2016 and the allegation that Trump campaign officials improperly agreed to receive damaging information about Secretary Hillary Clinton from foreign individuals.&nbsp; The question was whether campaign officials violated the federal ban on &ldquo;accept[ing] or receiv[ing]&rdquo; a &ldquo;thing of value&rdquo; from a foreign national.</p>
<p>His chapter also explored whether the payment of hush money to two of Trump&rsquo;s alleged mistresses (and the campaign&rsquo;s failure to report the payments to the Federal Election Commission) would constitute illegal contributions to the campaign if the payments were an attempt to prevent the public from learning damaging information about the candidate, according to a description in the book&rsquo;s preface.</p>
<p>The book is designed to be used in a capstone course&nbsp; in areas of administrative law, civil procedure, counterintelligence and congressional investigative activity, constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, election law, evidence, and professional responsibility.</p>
<p>Dimino thinks the book may have to be revised to keep it current. &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s going to be interested in a course on Mueller in five years?&rdquo; he said, pointing out that already there are controversial areas of the Trump presidency that have arisen only after the book&rsquo;s publication. Nevertheless, Dimino believes the issues analyzed in the book transcend the Mueller investigation itself, and the book certainly remains timely now. &ldquo;The legal issues continue,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And the analysis of the controversy that gave rise to the report is still out there.&rdquo;</p>