As prosecutors prepare to reconstruct the events surrounding the payment for grand jurors, they have sought to interview several witnesses, including the tabloid’s former editor, Dylan Howard, and two employees at Mr. Trump’s company, the people said. Mr. Howard and the Trump Organization employees, Jeffrey McConney and Deborah Tarasoff, have not yet testified before the grand jury.

The prosecutors have also begun contacting officials from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, one of the people said. And in a sign that they want to corroborate these witness accounts, the prosecutors recently subpoenaed phone records and other documents that might shed light on the episode.

A conviction is not a sure thing, in part because a case could hinge on showing that Mr. Trump and his company falsified records to hide the payout from voters days before the 2016 election, a low-level felony charge that would be based on a largely untested legal theory. The case would also rely on the testimony of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who made the payment and who himself pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money in 2018.

[It’s a case that Bragg should have dropped on this basis alone. The DoJ tried to prosecute John Edwards under the same theory of campaign-finance fraud and a jury soundly rejected this “largely untested legal theory.” And making someone who served time in federal prison for perjury the centerpiece of their case is a sign of utter desperation. It makes this all look like political retribution rather than justice. This kind of campaign finance issue for federal office should remain in the purview of the FEC and DoJ, too. — Ed]