To test if an expenditure made during a campaign is a violation of campaign finance laws is easy. Two former FEC chairmen, Obama’s and Trump’s spoke about the Cohen case in conversations with Mark Simon.
If a payment would not have occurred BUT FOR the campaign, it’s a campaign expense. Pretty simple.
Trump would have paid the women regardless of the campaign, just to prevent the information from getting back to his wife. Paying the hush money when public disclosure of his affair threatened his marriage is not a campaign expense. It’s something he would have paid anyway just to protect his marriage and family.
Of course, this doesn’t address the fact that Cohen plead to trumped up charges in a plea deal that was designed to cast Trump in a negative light. The theory would therefore never be tested in court; otherwise the charge would easily be thrown out, for the reasons stated above.
So despite what the New York Times breathlessly said today, Cohen is going to jail only for crimes he committed personally in his businesses. You can ignore this business about pleading guilty to campaign-finance laws, that’s simply a PR ploy; an integral strategy in Mueller (et al) cabal against our sitting president.