1. a candidate meets with a foreign agent to get dirt on their opponent, but no information changes hands. legal or illegal?
If no information changed hands, nothing happened. LEGAL
2. a candidate meets with a foreign agent to get dirt on their opponent, foreign agent gives info, but asks for no compensation. Legal or illegal?
As long as information was legally obtained and there was no law against receipt of that information on some technicality, LEGAL.(Sometimes there are two governments involved. One may not recognize the information as top secret. The other may, and may have rules in place to forbid it.)
3. a candidate meets with a foreign agent to get dirt on their opponent, foreign agent gives info, receives financial compensation. Legal or illegal?
As long as information was legally obtained and there was no law against receipt of that information or paying for it on some technicality, LEGAL. (Again: Sometimes there are two governments involved. One may not recognize the information as top secret. The other may, and may have rules in place to forbid it.)
4. a candidate meets with a foreign agent to get dirt on their opponent, foreign agent gives info, which was illegally obtained, but gets no compensation. Legal or Illegal?
The person obtaining the information could be seen as being the party of a conspiracy to obtain classified information. A foreign government or even our own could deem that actionable. Governments have a duty to keep certain things confidential.
5. a candidate meets with a foreign agent to get dirt on their opponent, foreign agent gives info, which was illegally obtained, gets financially compensated. Legal or illegal?
This could up the anti on number four, in that money changed hands. This would seem to make a case against the third party (the one paying for the information), more sustainable.
We're all anti-government on some level. We respect the government but want it to but out most of the time.
The best way to think about this, so we don't get too jacked up against the government, is how we looked at it when Hillary Clinton put classified information on an insecure server. We didn't approve of that at all.
There are limits to how information is obtained, handled, and disbursed. I think that is reasoned.
If #2 is illegal, then #1 is illegal. If you attempt to commit a crime, it doesn’t matter whether or not you got what you were after.