They are targeting the record keeping.
> JOHN MILLER: I am told by my sources that this is 34 counts of falsification of business records, which is probably a lot of charges involving each document,, each thing that was submitted as a separate count and a couple of matters.
Trump has a long, long, long history of illegal accounting incidents many of which he's gotten in trouble for in civil court. This is just the first time it's been in criminal court.
When the story rolled around the first time, people did indeed make the argument that the payment itself was illegal.
The campaign finance laws require expenditures that help your electoral chances to be declared as campaign expenditures.
They also prohibit declaring any expenditures that help you in your personal life.
This leads to the obviously terrible result that while you're campaigning for office, it's illegal to pay for anything that simultaneously helps you electorally ("the voters will never hear about my affair with a stripper!") and in your personal life ("my wife will never hear about my affair with a stripper!"). If you don't declare the campaign expense, you're violating the disclosure laws. If you do declare it, you're embezzling from the campaign.
It’s a very bizarre legal theory, and also I believe entirely untested and hugely problematic as you say.
Edwards used actual campaign donations to payoff his mistress to the tune of $1mm and they brought charges and he was found not guilty by the jury.
Here we have a long-standing “fixer” for Trump doing something he had always done and had a history of doing for Trump, with or without a campaign ongoing.
Calling it a campaign finance violation for a business partner to do the legal things that they always did is absurd on its face, besides the fact that such a law would put every politician everywhere in legal jeopardy, and yet surprisingly this theory seems to only be trotted out against Trump!
It’s often difficult to disconnect the actual crimes from wanting Justice generally for a person’s net life behaviour… which isn’t how this works IRL nor how it should work. Whether other crimes and social taboos should be better enforced is another matter entirely.