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Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Shabby is as shabby does: "In a pair of early-morning tweets, Mr. Trump also maintained that even if the hush-money payments did count as campaign transactions, any failure to obey federal election regulations should be considered only a civil offense, not a criminal one. And he blamed his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, who has admitted to helping arrange the payments. 'Lawyer’s liability if he made a mistake, not me,' Mr. Trump wrote."

Headline (omitting links) is text of the second paragraph of this NYT item. The item further states:

Though it is rare to charge a politician with campaign-finance crimes over hush-money payments to mistresses, one clear precedent stands out: the Justice Department’s prosecution in 2012 of John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator and 2004 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, over similar payments to hide a pregnant mistress while he was running for president in 2008.

A potential indictment of Mr. Trump for conspiring in the illegal campaign transactions to which Mr. Cohen has pleaded guilty would look a lot like the charges prosecutors brought against Mr. Edwards. [...]

But the meaning of the Edwards precedent for Mr. Trump’s fate is complicated, legal experts said. Because that case ended with a mistrial on five charges and an acquittal on one, it shows the risk of charging a politician with campaign-finance crimes over hush-money payments to mistresses, in which it is unclear whether the transactions were about trying to win an election or trying to protect the candidate’s personal life.

Indeed, after prosecutors made their filing in the Cohen case, one of Mr. Trump’s private lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, pointed to the jury’s failure to convict Mr. Edwards in support of the notion that Mr. Trump does not face realistic legal jeopardy over the payments.

[...] For one thing, one of the payments to Mr. Edwards’s mistress took place as he was ending his candidacy, which further muddied how to interpret his motivation. By contrast, the payments to Ms. McDougal and Ms. Daniels came just ahead of the election.

For another, prosecutors in the Edwards case had little corroboration from other key figures in the transactions to explain their motivation.

Adding the Giuliani judgment into the mix with the bare tweeting of course arguably lifts any pall of shabiness; Rudy being who he is. However, even with Rudy's theme being they do not have criminal grounds on Trump irrespective of any dimension of "shabby" this or "shabby" that, the amounts paid went into six figures and that arguably at least is not shabby pricing. A well trimmed Lexis would be cheaper.