> How does it show that? The campaign broke the law, was caught, and punished (fined).

> Degree of severity and attempts to conceal a crime are both considered serious factors in punishment a crime merits.

Which do you consider a more direct violation of campaign finance law with direct intent to benefit a campaign?

1. Paying a lawyer to pay a woman to not speak about an elicit affair from a decade prior.

2. Paying a lawyer to pay a private investigator to compile a negative dossier about your political opponent in the, at the time, current US general election.

As you have written it, neither of those two things are illegal to do, funnily enough.

Maybe reflect then on why one campaign settled a law suit, and Trump is being indicted at the moment, if again, neither is actually illegal under campaign finance law.

Hint: it's legal to pay for opposition research, but a violation to not disclose that you're doing it.

It's also legal to pay for an NDA, but not legal for the NDA to be created by direction of one's private lawyer, and then subsequently to use campaign finances to reimburse and list bonuses to that lawyer for legal services they never rendered to the campaign.

The comparison is that if it’s indeed illegal, how is one that is clearly only directly benefiting the campaign a mere misdemeanor fine and the other a felony?

It's very likely Bragg's attempt to push this to a felony fails. It's just speculation (SINCE WE DON'T KNOW THE CHARGES) about what evidence is available and what people might be doing.

If Trump gets a $1000 fine for this, I feel like that's justice.

> If Trump gets a $1000 fine for this, I feel like that's justice.

It's felony or nothing as the statute of limitations has expired on the misdemeanor. My money is on the latter.

You wrote this like it's obvious which one is worse under current law, but I have no idea. We also don't know what the actual charges against Trump are yet.

How were similar cases treated in the past? One case that keeps being discussed is the John Edwards case. Edwards was a presidential candidate; he had an affair with his videographer and had a child by her while his wife was dying of cancer. He paid a very large sum to the woman as hush money and was charged similarly with campaign finance violations. He specifically solicited money from wealthy donors to pay the hush money. Jury acquitted him on one charge and deadlocked on the rest; the DOJ dropped the rest of the charges.

Similarly the DOJ looked at the Trump hush money case and declined to prosecute.

Campaign finance laws in the US are a land mine and need reform. There is too much prosecutorial discretion and not enough clarity for people to know whether they are breaking the law. Campaign finance laws have become a way to fish for a crime against political enemies.

To wit: Bragg actively campaigned for his position promising to investigate Trump.

Rule of law should be about observing and then prosecuting crimes, not about spending years and millions investigating people looking for a crime that they committed.

I think this is the best comment here! It helps resolve the dissonance I feel here where I really don't love that this is the thing he's being charged for, but I also hate the idea that things that are illegal can't be prosecuted due to purely political considerations. But your point about prosecutorial discretion in campaign finance cases helps square this circle for me.

But I'd still say that we need to see more details of the case than have been released yet before drawing any conclusions.

We. Don't. Know. What. The. Charges. Are. Yet.

We do; they’ve been leaked to media. 30ish counts of falsifying business records related to if/how Trump reimbursed Cohen.

Equality under the law matters greatly and when officials of any type use their discretion to obtain outcomes that are not in the fat part of the bell curve for how said discretion is usually applied to similar fact patterns it needs to be well justified.

We haven't seen the indictment yet so it may be well justified but the scuttlebutt so far does not seem to strongly indicate that.