re: #18 KGxvi

It’s a Catch-22 for them. They didn’t want anyone to know about the payments, so they hid everything. Because they knew if the payments were disclosed, reporters would investigate and everything would come out. Which was the opposite of what they wanted to happen, so the only way to hide the story is to also hide the payments. But to knowingly hide the payments is (apparently) a criminal violation of campaign finance law. Compared to the more typical civil violations of campaign finance law where a campaign unintentionally miscategorizes a payment of some sort and later has to change it; or unintentionally authorizes a payment that isn’t allowed under the law.

The big difference here is “knowingly” vs “unknowingly”.

IOW, the sort of campaign-finance-law violation which, if it had been traced to a Democratic candidate or campaign organization, would be subject to a campaign of shrieking hysteria of ZOMG!! CORRUPTION!!1!!1! LOCK ‘EM UP!!!!1!!11!!, but gets shrugged off by most of the media as SOP for the GOP……