Team Trump’s third defense is to suggest that even if Trump directed the criminal activity, it was a trivial, barely criminal violation. Giuliani has hinted at this argument but probably its strongest articulation was by Professor Alan Dershowitz in the latest of defenses of the president on Fox News. Dershowitz compared the crimes to a “kind of jaywalking in the realm of things about elections,” and the sort of trifling conduct that “every candidate” violates.

This final claim is not only wrongheaded but pernicious. It attempts to analogize Cohen’s crimes, and Trump’s direction of them, to a technical oversight, a mere failure to file reports. The account completely distorts and understates the elaborate conspiracy that Cohen detailed and that was undertaken at Trump’s direction expressly for the purpose of influencing the election. McDougal and Daniels needed to be paid and silenced — and the silence covered up — in order to prevent the political fallout to a candidate who had barely weathered the disclosure of the Access Hollywood tape. The campaign-finance aspect of the crimes are a near-incidental detail in the context of the scheme’s purpose — a payment of hush money to influence an election. It is far more akin to the payment of bribes, or practice of dirty tricks as in Watergate, to secure an improper campaign advantage.