I didn’t think so in the case of John Edwards. Although Trump has a worse factual record to work with than Edwards in certain respects, I’m very skeptical that his payoffs were campaign expenditures, as I wrote for Politico today. I also think it would be kind of nuts to try to prosecute him for this alleged offense:
The idea that Trump is going to lose reelection in November 2020, then having suffered the humiliation of getting booted by the voters, get indicted and stand trial on a dubious campaign-finance violation dating from 2016 is fantastical. This would be a banana-republic move, and is more a Democratic revenge fantasy — or should be — than a realistic scenario.