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Former Senator John Edwards campaigning in Iowa City, Iowa on December 12, 2007 in Iowa City, Iowa. Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images

A politician paying hush money during a campaign to keep an alleged affair out of the headlines there is, undeniably, a striking similarity between the cases of one Donald J. Trump, former president, and John Edwards, a disgraced senator, with both accused not just of cheating but of skirting laws to cover it up.

The legal cases against both, however, are quite different.

For one, Trump has not been charged with violating federal campaign finance laws. Edwards was.

"Mr. Edwards is alleged to have accepted more than $900,000 in an effort to conceal from the public facts that he believed would harm his candidacy," Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said in 2011, announcing that the North Carolina Democrat was being charged with accepting illegal campaign contributions and a conspiracy to conceal them.

The gist of the government's case against Edwards was that the money which was given to Edwards' mistress should have been reported as a campaign donation, given that it came from the former senator's largest donors and would aid his 2008 presidential campaign. The case fell apart at trial, however, with jurors failing to convict Edwards on a single charge, history that some have suggested illustrates the difficulty of prosecuting Trump for his own alleged payments to Stormy Daniels.

"I think that shows that the one time the Justice Department tried to pursue a case like this, it failed," Hars von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told Fox News. "That was probably the biggest reason why the Justice Department and the FEC didn't go after Trump because they didn't believe that it was based on prior experience a violation of federal campaign finance law, and that's the biggest flaw in this whole case."

It may well be true that the Edwards precedent is why the Justice Department didn't charge Trump with a campaign finance violation. But, while Trump was still president, it did go after his former fixer, Michael Cohen and it did so successfully. Cohen, in 2018, was sentenced to three years in prison over a hush payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels that is at the heart of Trump's legal troubles today. Among other things, prosecutors charged Cohen with breaking campaign finance laws, arguing that his $130,000 payment to Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election constituted an illegal contribution to the Trump campaign.

Trump has denied the affair and any knowledge of the payments to Daniels, pleading not guilty to the charges he falsified business records.

In other words, federal prosecutors demonstrated that it is indeed possible to put someone behind bars for a hush payment to an alleged mistress which is itself legal by arguing that it broke campaign finance laws, coming as it did during a heated election. They were helped, to be sure, by the fact that Cohen pleaded guilty, eliminating the need for a trial; the Edwards prosecution failed, by contrast, because it went before jurors and because key witnesses, namely the donors who provided the cash for Edwards' mistress, were unable to appear and be questioned at trial (one had already died and one was over 100 years old and deemed too elderly).

When Cohen was indicted, prosecutors noted that he did not act alone, stating that he had made the payment to Daniels to "influence the 2016 election," and that he did so after having "coordinated with one or more members of the [Trump] campaign."

When he indicted the former president, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Brag did not do so on charges of violating federal law he, of course, cannot do that. Instead, he accused Trump of falsifying business records to hide the fact he was paying back Cohen for that payment to a porn star. That is a more straightforward case, in some respects: the prosecutor alleges that the payments to Cohen were marked as being for a retainer that federal prosecutors have already demonstrated did not exist.

Bragg does not need to prove that Trump broke federal campaign finance laws; he needs to prove that he falsified business records, which is a crime no matter the reason.

Where it gets dicey, in the view of legal experts, is the fact that the crime of falsifying those records is treated as a misdemeanor in New York, with a statute of limitations that has already expired. Upgrading the charges to felonies, as Bragg has (34 counts), eliminates the time limit but also requires showing that the records were fudged in the service of another crime, whether or not the accused was convicted of another crime or not.

In his indictment of Trump, Bragg does not say what crime that might be. But an accompanying "statement of facts" accuses the former president of taking part in an "unlawful scheme" that "violated election laws" (speaking to reporters, Bragg noted that state law "makes it a crime to conspire to promote a candidacy by unlawful means"); it also accuses Trump of mischaracterizing the payments to Cohen "for tax purposes."

Speaking to CNN, Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University, said that if the underlying crime is a state tax issue then Bragg would be able to avoid questions about campaign finance laws, including whether a hush payment constitutes a violation something that jurors were not convinced of in the Edwards trial more than a decade earlier.

"That is a stronger case," Goodman said, "because it is insulated from a bunch of the legal challenges, of which there are strong legal challenges to be made to election law crimes."

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com

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The Donald Trump indictment is not like the case against John Edwards - Business Insider

WASHINGTON The leader of the Republican National Committee said Wednesday that the party and Fox News will co-host the first GOP debate of the primary season this August in Milwaukee.

The debate is expected to be the first face-to-face meeting between former President Donald Trump and his campaign rivals; the guest list is not yet setbecause some possible contendershave not officially declared their candidacy.

The date of the debate has not been set.

"The next President of the United States will be on our debate stage, and we look forward to hosting a fair and transparent platform," said RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who made the announcement on the morning program "Fox & Friends."

The GOP picked Milwaukee as the site of the first debate because the Wisconsin city will host the party convention next year. The party did the same thing in the 2016 election cycle, producing a first debate in Cleveland a year before that city hosted the Republican National Convention.

The debate over debates:Republican loyalty pledge: RNC chair says 2024 GOP candidates must sign pledge to participate in debates

Trump's situation:Trump after arrest: What's next legally and politically for the former president?

GOP candidates participate in the Fox Business Network Republican presidential debate at the North Charleston Coliseum and Performing Arts Center on Jan. 14, 2016 in North Charleston, S.C.

Trump, defeated for reelection in 2020, has announced that he will seek the White House again in 2024.He is running while under indictment, charged with false reporting of hush money payments to hide violations of campaign finance laws.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson have announced plans to seek the presidency.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is not expected to announce his candidacy until at least May.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said Thursday he has created an exploratory committee for a potential 2024 campaign.

Former Vice President Mike Pence is also mulling a 2024 presidential campaign.

In announcing the sponsorship of Fox News, McDaniel said otherdebate partners include the Young Americas Foundationand the video platform Rumble.

Story continues

The announcement also came as Fox News is embroiled in a defamation suitwith Dominion Voting Systems over news coverage of Trump's election protests in 2020.

Trump's legal position at the time of the August debate is unknowable.

In addition to the New York indictment, Trump remains under investigation in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta in cases involving the handling of classified documents and efforts to overturn his loss in Georgia to President Joe Biden.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fox News, GOP to co-host August debate with Trump, 2024 rivals

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Showdown: Fox News, Republican Party co-host August debate with Donald Trump and 2024 rivals - Yahoo News

Melania Trump is furious about her husband Donald Trump's alleged affairs but lives in an ivory tower of denial and uses her silence as a protective armour, a former aide said as per The Mirror after the ex-US President faced charges over hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

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Melania Trump did not accompany Donald Trump for the New York arraignment and was also not seen later when the former US President returned to Florida. Former aide Stephanie Wolkoff Winston said that Melania will never divorce him" though, despite the affairs.

Of course she knows about Donald's affairs, she knows everything. But her silence is her dignity," Stephanie Wolkoff Winston said.

She will stand by her husband, as she always does. I don't think Melania is humiliated by his affairs but she is angry, she added.

Read more: Prince Harry's demands after Queen's death 'shocked' royal family, book claims

Donald Trump became the first former president in history to face criminal charges even though he denied all the charges.

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"Her silence is deliberate, it is her weapon of choice and her protective armour." Still she isn't leaving him. This is a transactional marriage, she knew what she was getting into when she married Donald. Her means of survival is to just act like it never happened," the ex-aide added.

When not reading, this ex-literature student can be found searching for an answer to the question, "What is the purpose of journalism in society?"...view detail

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Melania angry about Donald Trump's 'affairs' but her silence is - Hindustan Times

Updated 5 April 2023

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Watch: Three takeaways from Trump's day in court

Last week, we learned Donald Trump had been charged with a crime. Now we know the former US president faces 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Although falsifying records are usually treated as lesser misdemeanours, Mr Trump is accused of committing felony offences. That denotes a more serious crime, which could include prison time if a maximum sentence is given.

"At its core, this case today is one with allegations like so many of our white-collar cases," New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg said of the charges his office has brought against the former president. "Allegations that someone lied, again and again, to protect their interests and evade the laws to which we are all held accountable."

Mr Trump - who pleaded not guilty to all the charges - insisted after leaving the courthouse that there was no case to answer. "There was nothing done illegally!" he posted on his social media website.

That, however, will be for a jury to decide. In the meantime, here are the details of the historic first-ever criminal indictment of a former president.

All 34 charges relate to hush-money payment

The charges all relate to a $130,000 hush-money payment by lawyer Michael Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels just before 2016 election in order to prevent her from talking about her allegations that she had an affair with Mr Trump in 2007.

In the court documents, Cohen is referred to as Lawyer A and Stormy Daniels as Woman 2.

Trump's alleged cover-up happened when he was president

New York's case against Mr Trump hinges on how Cohen was compensated for those hush-money payments.

In 2017, after becoming president, Mr Trump met with Cohen in the White House. Shortly thereafter - and over the course of 10 months - Mr Trump began sending cheques from a trust handling his assets, and later from his own bank account, to Cohen.

Those cheques were registered as "legal fees," but Cohen says they were, in fact, reimbursements for the hush-money payment.

The prosecution case states: The payment records, kept and maintained by the Trump Organization, were false New York business records. In truth, there was no retainer agreement, and Lawyer A was not being paid for legal services rendered in 2017. The Defendant caused his entities' business records to be falsified to disguise his and others' criminal conduct.

From a misdemeanour to a felony

Mr Bragg alleges that Mr Trump falsified the true nature of the payments because those payments were made in support of a crime. While hush-money payments are not by themselves illegal, spending money to help a presidential campaign but not disclosing it violates federal campaign finance law.

Cohen was convicted of just such a violation for not disclosing his payment to Ms Daniels. By reimbursing Cohen for that payment, Mr Bragg asserts, Mr Trump is tied to that criminal act - and it makes his falsification of business record a more serious offence.

Mr Trump's defenders argue that is a legal stretch, and that this is a politically-motivated prosecution.

'A pattern of criminal behaviour'

Mr Bragg cites two other examples of hush-money payments by Mr Trump's campaign. These payments, he says, support the prosecution case that Mr Trump knew his payments to Cohen were part of an illegal attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election.

"The defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the defendant's electoral prospects," the indictment's Statement of Facts asserts. "In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York."

In one case, a doorman who said he knew Mr Trump had a child out of wedlock received $30,000. In another, a second woman who claimed she had an an affair with Mr Trump received $150,000. Mr Trump has denied the affair.

These payments came from the tabloid National Enquirer magazine and its then-publisher, David Pecker, who Mr Bragg says co-ordinated with Mr Trump to suppress potentially damaging information from seeing the light of day. As a reward, the indictment notes, Mr Pecker received an invitation to Mr Trump's inauguration.

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What are 34 felony charges against Trump, and what do they reveal? - BBC

All 34 felony charges against Trump are identical, with each carrying the possibility of up to four years in prison, although judges rarely sentence defendants to jail for such offenses.

The indictment is a bare-bones document that simply recites the alleged offenses in boiler-plate language. However, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Braggs office also released a 14-page statement of facts laying out the case in greater detail.

Here are details from the groundbreaking court filings that could make or break the case of People v. Donald J. Trump.

Going into Tuesdays historic and much-previewed arraignment, a key mystery was exactly how Bragg planned to bring the charges as felonies. The charge at the heart of the case falsifying business records can amount to only a misdemeanor, but it becomes a felony if the defendant falsified the records to obscure a separate crime.

The most obvious candidate for that aggravating element is the admission from Trumps former lawyer, Michael Cohen, that he arranged a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in consultation with Trump and to aid Trumps 2016 presidential campaign.

The defendant Donald J. Trump repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election, the statement of facts says.

The participants [in the scheme] violated election laws, the statement continues, though it does not explicitly cite which ones. The statement also mentions Cohens guilty plea in 2018 to two federal campaign finance crimes. And in a press release, Bragg said Trump and others sought to conceal attempts to violate state and federal election laws.

The references to federal election violations are virtually certain to be the focus of pre-trial motions from Trumps attorneys, who have contended publicly that this state-law offense cannot be piggybacked on a federal-law crime.

If defense attorneys prevail on such motions, it would not necessarily wipe out the criminal case against Trump. Instead, the case could remain as 34 misdemeanor charges. That would amount to a legal, public relations and political victory for Trump.

Such a result would further diminish the chances of Trump being jailed if found guilty. The maximum sentence on a second-degree falsifying business records charge is up to one year in prison on each count. A downgrading of the case to a misdemeanor might also aid Trumps efforts to delay a trial.

The charges against Trump do not include any tax fraud offenses that some legal experts said they hoped to see to buttress the seriousness of the case. However, the statement of facts Bragg filed along with the indictment makes a surprising claim: that Trump and his associates engaged in deception by paying New York state more in taxes than it was owed.

The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme, the statement says.

It alleges that Trump paid an increased reimbursement to Cohen a procedure known as grossing up the payment in order to compensate him for the taxes he would owe by booking the money as legal fees.

These alleged contortions resulted in Cohen paying about $180,000 in state and federal income taxes, when he may have not owed anything if Trump had simply reimbursed him for the $130,000 and the payment had been properly recorded. Thats because the reimbursement of money Cohen already paid to Daniels wouldnt have represented income for Cohen.

But recording the money, falsely, as legal fees subjected Cohen to significant income-tax liability meaning that any trickery the men engaged in may actually have benefitted state and federal coffers. That may be why Braggs team doesnt deem the practice fraud, and why no tax fraud or evasion charge was included in the indictment.

For Trump to be convicted of falsifying business records, the records at issue have to be, well, business records.

The New York law at issue requires that the falsification involve the records of an enterprise, and each count of the indictment claims that Trump falsified records kept and maintained by the Trump Organization.

The facts are more complicated. Its true that the checks sent to Cohen, which labeled the payments as legal expenses, were issued by employees working for Trumps business empire. But they were not charged to Trumps businesses. Instead, the payments were made from one of Trumps personal accounts or from a Trump family trust.

The key question, and one that is sure to feature in efforts by Trumps lawyers to derail the case, is whether documents that happened to pass through the Trump Organization or handled by Trump Organization personnel are automatically classified as business records, even if the source of the funds was Trumps personal accounts.

Braggs statement of facts declares that each check was processed by the Trump Organization and gives further details about how Cohen arranged payment from bookkeepers at the Trump companies. Prosecutors say at least two of the payments were approved by longtime Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to unrelated tax evasion charges in 2021.

The TO CFO approved the payment, and, in turn, the TO Controller sent the invoice to the Trump Organization Accounts Payable Supervisor (the TO Accounts Payable Supervisor) with the following instructions: Post to legal expenses. Put retainer for the months of January and February 2017 in the description, the prosecutors filing says.

Legal experts said they expect Trumps lawyers to argue to the judge and, if necessary, a jury that wholly personal expenses that are simply handled by an accountant or other clerical personnel dont become the records of an enterprise just by virtue of that process.

Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.

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The new revelations and key questions in the Trump indictment - POLITICO