The jurors was unable to reach a verdict on five of the charges against Edwards and chose to dismiss that allegation.
The accusation leveled against ex-President Trump has been likened to the hush-money case leveled against Democratic presidential candidate and loser in 2004 John Edwards.
When Edwards was a presidential candidate in 2008, he accepted $1 million from donors to conceal an extramarital romance. In 2011, he was accused of six crimes related to campaign finance violations. After a jury in 2012 found Edwards not guilty on one count of illegally accepting campaign contributions and deadlocked on the other counts, the Justice Department chose not to retry him.
After years of investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, a grand jury in Manhattan brought charges against Trump last Thursday for allegedly paying unlawful hush money to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.
The investigation into Trump is happening at the state level, while the charges against Edwards were brought at the federal level. Experts believe Trump may benefit from the similarities between the two instances.
Fox News Digital spoke with a law scholar, former FEC members, and a former federal counsel to get their take on why Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg might have a tough time with the Edwards case.
You can read their full comments down below.
There are two major takeaways from the Edwards case. The federal district court judge in the Edwards case let the case go to trial on what was basically that theory, that friends of the candidate paid a woman to keep quiet, and that was a campaign expense, Smith said in a phone interview with Fox News Digital.
Which brings up another point: the judges agreed with Edwards. A portion of the charges against him were dropped while others were upheld, he explained. Your point about how difficult it is to win such a lawsuit on the basis of the law and the evidence is well taken.
The Edwards lawsuit was taken as far as the federal level. According to Smith, federal authorities are not handling this matter. One legal expert has predicted that, should the trial go forward, Trump will be found not guilty of violating federal campaign funding rules. Instead, a New York state judge will find him guilty of violating a law prohibiting the falsification of company documents for the purpose of concealing other crimes, in this case, the misuse of campaign funds.
Therefore, the attorney has a case within a case, as Smith put it. Trump must prove that he would have prosecuted and won the same federal offense if he had been U.S. attorney in order to prove his guilt in the New York case.
According to Smith, that’s challenging for attorneys to do, but it could be beneficial in the long term. If the matter gets before a jury, it is not necessary to prove the federal crime beyond a reasonable question. The justices only need to be persuaded that Trump is a bad person who committed the crime. Perhaps that’s enough for a conviction on the state offense.
According to Spakovsky’s interview with Fox News Digital, “I think it shows that Alvin Bragg is trying to make it look like a federal campaign finance law was broken.” Then he went on to explain how the Justice Department went after John Edwards for having illegally diverted campaign funds to pay for his girlfriend instead of his campaign. They had low expectations for you.
In his opinion, this proves that the Justice Department had previously attempted to pursue a similar case and failed. The Justice Department and the FEC didn’t pursue charges against Trump because, based on their prior experience, they didn’t believe he had broken federal campaign funding legislation.
To determine whether a given expenditure is “campaign-related” and thus liable to all laws and regulations, the Federal Elections Commission applies a test known as the “irrespective test” “Would you have to pay for that anyway if you weren’t running for office?”
Since “all those costs would be there whether or not you were running for office,” Spakovsky argued that candidates could not use campaign funds to do things like “pay the mortgage on your house or buy a car.”
Personal injury claims settlements, which is what this is, occur regardless of whether or not you are a candidate for public office, in my opinion. The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) says you should give it more weight because you’re a candidate for public office, but they don’t regulate it.
According to Cherkasky, “from the prosecutor’s point of view, the Edwards case was much stronger than this Trump case.” He made these comments in an interview with Fox News Digital.
In that instance, too, it’s obvious that the prosecution was unable to secure a conviction,” Cherkasky said. This is due to the criminal nature of violating campaign finance laws. The prosecution must prove not only that the defendant willfully disregarded the rules regarding the disclosure of campaign financing.
They presumably couldn’t get a conviction because of the reason they paid in the Edwards case. Keep in mind that if the money was intended to keep something quiet, it must be disclosed as such. It’s possible that he made the payments to avoid embarrassing his ill wife. Or it could have been for any other cause besides the reality that it was a scam.
There was no denying that the funds had been transferred, and Edwards had a hand in the transaction. The evidence against Edwards became more solid as a result of this. She emphasized that “that’s not even a concession from Trump.”
Experts are having an even harder time figuring out the Trump case. They still need to justify why Trump paid the lady even if they show he did.
Cherkasky predicted that the defendants would have a hard time demonstrating that the bribe was anything other than a deliberate attempt to disrupt the election.