THE MAN WHO COULD BRING DOWN TRUMP
“Donald Trump – or, as he’s known to federal prosecutors, Individual-1 – might well be a criminal.” That’s not just my opinion, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times; it’s also that of the Justice Department. The president’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, was last week sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion and fraud, and for violating campaign finance laws by arranging for hush money payments to be paid to two women who said they’d slept with Trump during the 2016 presidential election. And as federal prosecutors had earlier noted, the latter violation wasn’t carried out alone, but “in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1”. The Justice Department, in other words, reckons Trump “may have committed a felony that went to the heart of the process that put him in office”.
US campaign-finance law holds that any payment made “for the purpose of influencing any election for federal office” must be reported and subject to limits, said Bradley A. Smith in National Review. So Trump is bang to rights, right? Actually, no. Under an overly literal interpretation of this clause, any spending – whether on soap and clothes to make oneself presentable, or petrol to get to rallies – could be classed as having the purpose of “influencing” an election. But such personal spending is rightly counted as separate. So should Trump’s hush money be. He had “many valid, nonelectoral reasons for trying to keep these allegations quiet, most notably family harmony”. Had he paid the women off with campaign funds, people would now be accusing him of having made illegal “personal use” of campaign contributions.
Breaching campaign-finance laws is typically a civil matter punishable with a fine, said Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. It becomes a criminal issue if you can show the violation was “knowing and wilful”. The fact that Trump and Cohen initially denied the hush money payments, and paid them through a shell company to avoid detection, suggests they knew what they were doing was illegal. Sitting presidents can’t be indicted, said Michelle Goldberg, nor, without cross-party support, impeached. But many experts believe that if Trump is voted out of office in 2020, before the five-year statute of limitations on campaign-finance violations runs out, he could face charges and perhaps even prison time. “The 2020 presidential election was always going to be extraordinarily ugly, but one can only imagine what Trump will do if the alternative to the White House is the big house.”