KNOWN KNOWNS:

David Lurie is an attorney who practices in New York and writes about the intersection of law and politics. I did a Q&A with Lurie back in November about the DOJ investigation of Trump and ended up so impressed with his legal mind that I asked him if he'd be interested in writing for Public Notice. Thankfully he was up for it, and since then he's done great work in this newsletter on topics ranging from Kevin McCarthy to Bill Barr and Tucker Carlson. [...]

David Lurie [...]

Frankly, if Trump's situation is considered as a federal criminal campaign finance case, the evidence is pretty compelling against him. There were two women who claimed to have affairs with him. One woman [Karen McDougal] was paid for her story by the National Enquirer, which was then run by allies of Trump, but of course they never published anything about it, so she was paid to keep quiet. In the Daniels case, Michael Cohen -- Trump's fixer -- paid the money out of his own pocket, then got reimbursed by Trump right during the heat of the 2016 campaign. It's pretty clear that these were payments not to speak about the affairs in the time period right before the election.

Further, Trump is on record showing that he fully understands the law in this area. In fact, he was recorded in a cable news interview before Edwards went to trial discussing the case and why he didn't think Edwards should be prosecuted even though he didn't like him.

So Trump is well aware of the campaign finance laws, and that's important because knowledge of them is highly relevant to potential culpability. Now, why is that important here, since this isn't a federal campaign finance case? Well, there also are New York campaign finance laws that arguably were violated in connection with these payments.

I want to be very clear here that I am not taking any position on whether there's a valid theory for indicting Trump. There's a lot of speculation about that, but we haven't seen the indictment. We don't know all the evidence, because some of it has been taken in by a grand jury in secret. So I'm speaking in general and frankly somewhat hypothetical terms. But as I said there appears to be a substantial argument that just like the federal campaign finance laws, Trump violated the New York campaign finance laws, and might have done so knowingly. That's relevant because the rumor is that the New York DA is considering bringing a business records falsification case, and the difference between a business records falsification case being a misdemeanor and a felony turns on whether the falsification was related to a known effort to violate another law. So in this case, the other law would most likely be the campaign finance laws.

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