One odd wrinkle about the Cohen campaign finance case: Trump could have legally paid off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal as long as he used campaign funds and reported the expenditure. 1/
And Trump wouldn’t have had to report the expenditure as “hush money to mistresses” or anything so damning. Campaign finance law experts have said he could have reported it as “legal services” or “litigation settlement.” cbc.ca/news/world/tru… 2/
Indeed, they wouldn't have needed to report the October 27 payment to Stormy (in contrast to the earlier McDougal payment) until after Election Day under Federal Election Commission rules. 3/ transition.fec.gov/pages/report_n…
So Cohen and Trump could have gone the legal route and quite possibly gotten away with it. Why didn’t they? Perhaps they were too ignorant to know this was an option, or they were paranoid that the underlying facts would somehow leak before the election. 4/
The lessons here are to hire competent lawyers and listen to them, don’t have mistresses, and don’t pay them off. It’s good to have a lawyer, bad to have a mistress, and perilous to hush either. 5/end
