He was convicted of making illegal campaign contributions, among other charges. The hush money payments were considered a campaign contribution.
Yeah, that's funny. It clearly wasn't a campaign contribution.
All of these legal charges, both Cohen's and Trump's could have been easily avoided if Trump would have written the payoff checks on his personal account, not altered any business records, and reported those amounts as campaign contributions in October 2016.
If Trump wrote a personal check for the NDA, that would have been a campaign contribution?
Then he could have reported the payoffs as campaign expenses in November after the election and it would have been all perfectly legal.
Paying off a bimbo with campaign contributions is perfectly legal? Are you sure?
His first thought is how can I hide these payments so no one will discover them?
When you're paying someone to keep something quiet, it's pretty much the
point that no one discovers them. Right?
Recording the payments as legal fees allowed the Trump Organization to deduct these payments from his federal and state taxes.
From what I've seen, payments for most, not all, NDAs are already tax deductible.