What of the claims that Sony orginised methods to get around the $2000 limit of donations? I'm curious if this would be illegal, and if not I feel it should be. And even if there are reasons for it to be legal, I'm grateful I at least can learn about it when it happens.

From the email I read, that relied on executives making a donation of their own money. I don't see how this different from any other appeal. And in any way political donations are publicly available, you don't need leaked emails to identify them.

Making six $3k deposits in a row isn't a crime. Doing so to avoid the reporting limits, is.

It might turn out that because of some quirk of law that intentionally getting around donation restrictions isn't illegal (which is presumably should be, just like the banking regulations...) but even if so it's still pretty clearly an end-run around the intent of the law and that's a pretty scummy thing to do.

Especially because I think it's pretty easy to see the easily coercive nature of this. After all, donations are publicly visible... I wouldn't expect to be fired for not, but I would expect not to be promoted unless I did.