Trump’s campaign finance case is a reach
One of the arguments made in favor of Donald Trump’s expected indictment by a New York grand jury is that John Edwards faced prosecution under very similar circumstances.
It would be a valid point, except for one thing: Legal experts widely regarded the indictment and trial of Edwards as an embarrassing overreach by the U.S. Justice Department. There’s good reason to see Trump’s situation in the same light.
Both the Trump and Edwards cases involved alleged hush-money payments to women to prevent a candidate’s marital infidelity from becoming public knowledge.
Both Trump and Edwards were running for president at the time the alleged payments were made.
Edwards, a former U.S. senator from North Carolina who had been the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, was seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2008.
During that period, he cheated on his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth, with aspiring film producer Rielle Hunter. In February 2008, Hunter gave birth to Edwards’ daughter.
According to Andrew Young, Edwards’ then-aide, two wealthy Edwards donors paid Hunter $925,000 to buy her silence about the affair. One of those donors, Bunny Mellon, allegedly sent checks hidden in boxes of chocolates, and Young passed those payments on to Hunter.
A decade before his 2016 presidential run, Trump allegedly had a tryst with porn star Stormy Daniels. To keep Daniels from publicizing the affair, Trump’s then-attorney Michael Cohen paid her $130,000. Trump later reimbursed Cohen.
Both the Edwards and Trump criminal cases revolved around the notion that when a politician pays (or arranges for someone else to pay) hush money to keep an affair under wraps, it constitutes a campaign contribution. By that rationale, both Edwards and Trump violated campaign finance disclosure laws and lied about it.
It’s a tough legal argument to make, particularly because politicians in those situations can claim they were making the payments to save their family public embarrassment or to prevent their spouses from knowing about the alleged infidelities, not to benefit their campaigns.
In Edwards’ case, he also insisted that the donors’ payments to Hunter were made without his knowledge (a contention that Young adamantly disputed).
By the time the Justice Department indicted Edwards, it had been three years since the story emerged. Two key players had passed away, and one of them (Bunny Mellon) was 100 years old.
Just about everyone, apart from the prosecutorial team, regarded it as a flimsy case.
A June 2011 Associated Press story pointed out that government attorneys were “relying on an untested legal theory to argue that money used to tangentially help a candidate … should have been considered a campaign contribution.”
In 2011, Melanie Sloan, a progressive who was then executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, questioned why federal officials were devoting precious resources to the Edwards case.
“This is a really broad definition of campaign contribution,” Sloan said. “It has never been this broadly interpreted.”
The Edwards case ended in a mistrial, with the jury acquitting the former senator on one count (accepting illegal campaign contributions) and failing to reach a verdict on the other five. Two weeks later, the Justice Department dropped the case.
Conservative free-speech advocate David Keating offered an assessment that could just as easily be applied to the Trump case:
“Prosecutors should stop trying to use vague laws to criminalize politics.”
Edwards behaved like a royal sleazeball, and he richly deserved the political-pariah status that the cheating scandal brought down on him.
The same goes for Trump’s pattern of personal behavior, compounded in this case by his insistence on referring to Daniels as “Horseface.”
But that doesn’t make either case worthy of criminal prosecution.
Given the way that Trump consistently runs roughshod over the American legal system, it’s frustrating to think that the first criminal indictment he’ll face (and the first one ever faced by a former U.S. president) will hinge on the murky semantics of campaign finance law.
In January 2021, Trump tried to use his office to bully Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” him 11,780 votes, enough to flip that state’s presidential election in his favor. (An indictment on racketeering and conspiracy charges could be coming soon in Georgia.)
Trump has also faced credible allegations of tax and bank fraud.
In 2019, the state of New York shut down Trump’s foundation and ordered him to pay $2 million in damages to eight charities whose donations he used for his own personal benefit.
One of the great contradictions surrounding Trump is that he always defines himself as a victim of relentless persecution by government officials, but, in truth, he has made a career of courting legal danger.
It’s taken a long time for Trump to face criminal consequences for his actions. It should have been for something more consequential than this.