> No one has ever pointed to a charge that related to the payment itself that I’ve heard.
When the story rolled around the first time, people did indeed make the argument that the payment itself was illegal.
The campaign finance laws require expenditures that help your electoral chances to be declared as campaign expenditures.
They also prohibit declaring any expenditures that help you in your personal life.
This leads to the obviously terrible result that while you're campaigning for office, it's illegal to pay for anything that simultaneously helps you electorally ("the voters will never hear about my affair with a stripper!") and in your personal life ("my wife will never hear about my affair with a stripper!"). If you don't declare the campaign expense, you're violating the disclosure laws. If you do declare it, you're embezzling from the campaign.
The Feds specifically declined to prosecute for this.
It’s a very bizarre legal theory, and also I believe entirely untested and hugely problematic as you say.
Edwards used actual campaign donations to payoff his mistress to the tune of $1mm and they brought charges and he was found not guilty by the jury.
Here we have a long-standing “fixer” for Trump doing something he had always done and had a history of doing for Trump, with or without a campaign ongoing.
Calling it a campaign finance violation for a business partner to do the legal things that they always did is absurd on its face, besides the fact that such a law would put every politician everywhere in legal jeopardy, and yet surprisingly this theory seems to only be trotted out against Trump!
When the story rolled around the first time, people did indeed make the argument that the payment itself was illegal.
The campaign finance laws require expenditures that help your electoral chances to be declared as campaign expenditures.
They also prohibit declaring any expenditures that help you in your personal life.
This leads to the obviously terrible result that while you're campaigning for office, it's illegal to pay for anything that simultaneously helps you electorally ("the voters will never hear about my affair with a stripper!") and in your personal life ("my wife will never hear about my affair with a stripper!"). If you don't declare the campaign expense, you're violating the disclosure laws. If you do declare it, you're embezzling from the campaign.