re: #5 Belafon

I am not a lawyer, so why should those payments have been made through the campaign?

The campaign finance law requires that you must report campaign contributions in a timely fashion. You must report if the funds are being used to influence a campaign. Here, Trump made significant payments to McDougal and Daniels for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election outcome but never reported them.

Trump now claims that he personally made the payment, which doesn’t solve his problem - the crime was failing to report the payment in the first place.

Inadvertent errors are not the same as purposefully refusing to report. Obama being late to report within days isn’t the same as Trump being caught lying on his FEC filings (the lie being the omission of these payments).