Trump Reminds Everyone He’s Implicated in Federal Campaign Finance Violations

Just as the bombshell news that President Donald Trump was implicated in the felony campaign finance violations committed by his lawyer subsided from the news cycle, the president decided to blast out the following tweet early Saturday morning:

Many people currently a part of my opposition, including President Obama & the Dems, have had campaign violations, in some cases for very large sums of money. These are civil cases. They paid a fine & settled. While no big deal, I did not commit a campaign violation!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2019

“Many people currently a part of my opposition, including President Obama & the Dems, have had campaign violations, in some cases for very large sums of money,” Trump wrote. “These are civil cases. They paid a fine & settled. While no big deal, I did not commit a campaign violation!”

Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was charged with violating federal campaign finance laws for payments he made to women, weeks before the 2016 election, to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump. Prosecutors said Trump directed Cohen to make those payments, in violation of the law.

The president wouldn’t be the first to violate campaign finance laws: Obama’s campaign faced a civil penalty, and had to pay a fine, for reporting errors — common for large campaigns. Cohen’s potential violation, which prosecutors said was carried out with the intention of illegally influencing the election, is in a completely different league, experts say.

The abrupt shift to talking about campaign finance violations comes as the news cycle (and Trump’s Twitter feed) has moved on to covering the government shutdown. One has to wonder why the president has decided to leap back into that controversy.

[Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images]

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