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Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure there is no cap on how much Trump was allowed to spend on his own campaign; that's why US politics is filled with so many rich people spending so much on their campaigns for office (sometimes for very little effect, as happened with Bloomberg). What's capped is how much any single other individual can contribute. Also, it's probably not all that clear that the payment should count as campaigning; if I remember rightly there was some speculation at the time it first became public that Trump might've funded the payment with campaign funds and people came up with equally plausible arguments that this would've been illegal because it obviously wasn't a campaign expense.

The whole thing is... probably not great grounds on which to carry out the first criminal indictment of a former US president, but the state of US politics and media in 2023 is such that outside of Trump circles the issues will be largely ignored.

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As far as I can tell, here's how the justification that it's a crime worth charging goes:

1. Would Stormy Daniels announcing weeks before the election that she and Donald Trump had an affair have impacted the election? Yes.

2. Was the (perfectly legal) money paid to Stormy Daniels to prevent that thus intending to influence the election? Yes. Ergo, it's a campaign expense.

And here's where it turns into what I believe they'll be charging.

3. Knowing the above, did Trump funnel the payment through Michael Cohen with the intent to conceal it from campaign finance disclosure transparency? If so, that's conspiracy and a felony through falsifying business records to conceal another crime.

If you break the law inadvertently, that's generally a lesser crime. If you specifically know you're breaking the law and still do it, that's usually a higher charge. And if you take additional actions to conceal the fact that you broke the law, that's an even higher charge.

And because these are financial crimes, it's easier to find records of the intermediate payments.

> did Trump funnel the payment through Michael Cohen with the intent to conceal it from campaign finance disclosure transparency

but if Trump paid directly himself, it wouldn't violate campaign finance laws? Because there is no campaign finance limit on Trump himself.

That said, they still have to prove "Ergo, it's a campaign expense" - any individual is motivated to protect their reputation aside from campaigns.

but if Trump paid directly himself, it wouldn't violate campaign finance laws?

That's my (uneducated) understanding, but the speculation is that he didn't pay it himself because then he couldn't deny (to friends/family/fans/donors/voters) that he knew her.

> but if Trump paid directly himself, it wouldn't violate campaign finance laws?

Correct. My understanding is that if Trump had paid Stormy Daniels directly and classified it as a campaign expense, it would have been legal and there would be no case.

As for intent, expect it will turn on the exact language in the charged campaign finance laws. If Trump can find a reason he wasn't required to disclose, there is no felony concealment.

On the whole, a good thing for campaign finance law to have a high profile fight between two well-resourced legal teams. Hopefully it might drive some future reform and better law, as the boundaries are clarified.

> if Trump paid directly himself, it wouldn't violate campaign finance laws?

That is still a campaign expense and needs to be reported to the state. Reporting on who donated money is a totally separate report.

Yup, you're right:

> Candidate contributions to their own campaigns are not subject to any limits.

https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...

They're getting him on the technicality that it was not him but one of his corporations that made the payment.

This isn't about campaign contribution limits, it's about declaring campaign expenses.

As far as I've read, it was money his campaign legally had, spent on something he could legally spend it on... that he attempted to conceal the payment for, so it wouldn't show up in campaign finance reports.

Ironically, if he'd just paid it directly from campaign funds and given it an obfuscated name ("PR Services"), he'd be in much less legal trouble now.

Those sound like very tenuous grounds. Most peoples' lawyers bill them for ancillary expenses, from printing/copying to first-class flights and other purchases in the line of work. It's not inconceivable that hush money would be in that category. Anything on a legal bill tends to go on most peoples' books as a "legal expense." In New York, there's no requirement to give clients itemized legal bills, although the client can request them. High-end lawyers tend to avoid itemizing their bills unless you ask (implying some sort of fee dispute).

At the same time, is this really the kind of thing you want a prosecutor to go after a former president and likely future presidential candidate from the opposing party for?

Why would you have a lawyer pay hush money? The concealment of the payment (having Cohen pay from his company, then reimbursing him as part of a larger payment) is the crime, not the payment.

And yes, I think all politicians should be gone after for breaking any campaign-finance-related law.

The legal ways to use money have so many loopholes (wink-nudge a PAC to pay off Stormy Daniels) that we shouldn't compromise an inch on what few restrictions we do have on the books.

This is a campaign finance violation. If we're not going to hold politicians beholden to those laws, then where is the line?

Lawyers often pay ancillary expenses for their jobs (including hush money), and bill their clients afterwards. In my own life, my lawyer pays my fees to the PTAB and then puts them on my monthly bill. That goes in my accounting books as "patent-related legal expenses," and this is fine according to my accountant - it's a bill from a lawyer, so it's a legal expense. I don't even know how much the PTAB bills me - the line on my itemized bills is a lump sum that includes administrative work in that line item (and as I understand it, the administrative work is actually quite expensive for a patent).

I think classifying this as "breaking any campaign-finance-related law" is a little bit of a strawman based on the fact pattern. It's one thing to go after someone for giving/accepting donations that are clearly illegal, but it's another thing to go after them for classifying hush money paid through a lawyer as a "legal expense" rather than a "PR expense." However, if New York were serious about justice, they would have had a clearly-politically-motivated prosecutor assign a special counsel to look for malfeasance here instead of running the prosecution himself.

Also, you should read the book "3 felonies a day," and it will give you more context on how much gray area there actually is in most crimes. The thesis of the book is that there is enough of a gray area that the average American commits 3 felonies a day.

This isn't an accounting crime. He's entitled to account for it in a variety of legal ways.

It's a campaign finance disclosure crime. Either he properly classified and disclosed a campaign related expense, or he didn't.

The difference with your example is that you presumably aren't running for office, and hence aren't required to formally disclose campaign expenses.

The ad hominem attacks on the prosecutor also seem... desperate and distasteful. Trump has enough money to afford a good legal defense team -- why should the country be in the business of deciding who is too big to prosecute?

And I've read it.

> why should the country be in the business of deciding who is too big to prosecute?

They are in this business because they have put themselves there - "3 felonies a day" should have told you about how that happened. Now that they are there, they have to avoid even creating the appearance that they are misusing the power in circumstances like this, where they are trying to prosecute political opponents. This is how civil wars start.

> The ad hominem attacks on the prosecutor also seem... desperate and distasteful.

Alvin Bragg campaigned on the fact that he was going to get Trump. It is a pertinent fact that the prosecutor going after Trump is literally trying to fulfill a campaign promise that he made publicly. If that isn't evidence that he was politically motivated, I don't know what is.

Civil wars start because an absence of the rule of law. I.e. politicians being able to avoid charges simply by virtual of their office.

And why does it matter if the prosecutor has a political ax to grind with Trump?

The distastefulness of the ad hominem attacks is the seeming thought process behind them: {prosecutor is political} == {no crimes he charges can be true}

Do crimes cease being crimes unless the prosecutor is inhumanly unbiased?

That's what a robust defense team is for.

About 80 million people have an ax to grind with Trump. Only a few of them are prosecutors who were literally elected on a promise of prosecuting him. That changes things, in my book. The correct way for him to have handled this would have been to follow through on his promise and also avoid his bias by appointing a special prosecutor with a very high budget to do the investigation - like the federal investigations before.

Also, believe it or not, prosecutors have strict ethical rules around being "advocates for justice" rather than trying to get their guy, and the hint of bias actually does mean that Trump's lawyers can get this charge thrown out on those grounds. It is actually true that on some level {prosecutor is political} == {no crimes he charged can be true}. The courts in the USA understand that to a degree, the process is the punishment, and so prosecutors can also get in trouble for nakedly biased prosecutions like this. This is different than civil litigators, who are free to be as biased and litigious as they want.

Personally, I would have had no issue if he had found some actual, serious malfeasance. In fact, I was hoping he would find some serious malfeasance in the Trump organization given all the other shit we know they did (but couldn't link back to the big guy). But no, the best he could find was Trump's accountant possibly misclassifying an expense on a disclosure form.

Corporations can not directly give money to candidates which includes sending money to a 3rd party at the direction of the candidate. It's a much more serious violation that simply a failure to report. Usually reporting violations are dealt with civilly, though I couldn't confirm that there are no criminal penalties with a brief google search.

The Economist article someone mirrored farther down has the clearest trace of the payments I can find: https://archive.is/0rJIh

Michael Cohen paid Stormy Daniels. The Trump organization reimbursed Michael Cohen. The candidate Trump never declared the payment on his campaigning behalf.

Do you have any links on the specific laws that preclude candidate-directed corporate payments? Haven't seen specific laws in the reporting thus far, although I expect when the charges come out it'll be all over.

>Ironically, if he'd just paid it directly from campaign funds and given it an obfuscated name ("PR Services"), he'd be in much less legal trouble now.

No, he would have probably instead be indicted for using campaign funds to pay a mistress under the theory that such a payment is not a valid campaign expense. The rules are so unclear that you could prosecute him either way.

That would be a misdemeanor, not a felony.

I ran for elected office in Colorado. I refused to take donations because I didn't want to go through the paperwork and regulatory hassle of taking donations. However, every penny I spent on my campaign still had to be reported to the state. Funding the campaign by yourself still needs to fill out paperwork only in months you actually spend money instead of every month (with legal restrictions on what you are allowed/required to do with any funds left over after the election).

Bloomberg ran because if Sanders' tax plans would have cost Bloomberg about $2 billion in higher taxes, so spending 1/4 of that to keep Sanders from getting the nomination was a reasonable maneuver.

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