President Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign fiances violations and fingered the president as unindicted co-conspiracy in the crime.
President Trump has rejected the guilty plea and said that campaign fiances crimes aren't actually crimes. "What Michael Cohen pled to weren't crimes," Trump said in an interview with Fox News.
However, Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general in the Obama administration wrote in The New York Times that Trump's argument would fail.
"Here’s the new Trump argument, stripped down to its essence: It was clear that he would reimburse Mr. Cohen for those payments to the women, and he’s allowed under Supreme Court precedent to give his campaign as much of his own money as he wants to," Katyal wrote.
He added that Trump, "Can’t ask other people to front the money for him and promise to pay them back later without reporting the arrangement in a timely fashion to the Federal Election Commission. But he didn’t report it."
Katyal said that "criminal intent," could be proven. "This means the very same act can be criminal if done with one state of mind and innocent if done with another."
He added that the thought of committing a crime can sometimes be worse than the crime itself. "Prosecutors use the conspiracy doctrine to punish two or more people who merely agree to commit a criminal act. They don’t even have to actually perform the act; they just need to have agreed to do so," he wrote.
He warned that President Trump should take "ordinary" out of his vocabulary.
"We are approaching a reckoning, where criminal and perhaps impeachment processes will begin asking hard questions," he said. "It would be a huge mistake for the president to rely on assurances from his legal team that what he did was ordinary and not prosecutable."
Read the full piece here.
