últimas notícias

Buried in the Justice Department’s sentencing announcement of President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen is a brief aside that may threaten Trump’s legal defense if he gets charged with violating campaign finance laws.

American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer that enabled Cohen’s payouts to former Trump flings Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, asserted that “its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.”

The three-year sentence issued to Cohen for violating campaign finance laws, income tax evasion, and lying to secure a loan indicates that prosecutors likely considered Cohen’s intentions as illicit. If Trump did in fact direct Cohen to broker the deals with Daniels and McDougal, today seriously hampered his best possible criminal defense: the John Edwards precedent.

In 2011, Edwards faced similar charges for payments issued to his mistress by private donors during his failed presidential bid. He was acquitted on the basis that the payments were meant to conceal the affair from his wife for personal and reputational reasons, not from the public for political reasons. What did Cohen in — or at least, what led him to plead guilty rather than mount the same defense as Edwards — were AMI’s claims that the Daniels and McDougal deals were intended to influence the election. This might hinder Trump’s ability to make the same argument.

For his part, the president tweeted about the outcome of the Edwards case in 2012, demonstrating that if he did direct the payments, he had mens rea in intentionally directing his personal attorney to violate federal law. Again, it is still unclear how much Trump knew and when. But AMI CEO and Chairman David Pecker met with Cohen and “at least one other member of the campaign” in 2015 specifically to discuss “assisting the campaign in identifying [negative stories about that presidential candidate’s relationships with women] so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”

Campaign finance laws as a whole are generally dumb, ineffectual, and easy to violate. If Trump did in fact direct Cohen to violate them, it’s likely not an impeachable offense, nor is it remotely comparable to the Democrats’ initial charge that he colluded with a foreign dictatorship to rig U.S. elections. But if Trump did direct Cohen to broker the payments to Daniels and McDougal, there’s one more piece of evidence now suggesting that he might have done so with criminal intent.