so, NOT specifically paid with campaign money
No, that's still not the same issue.
There is campaign spending (in theory) and there is campaign money.
Campaign money comes from registered and monitored escrow accounts. When you donate to a campaign the money goes into those accounts. There are all sorts of limits about who can give how much when. I think typically a candidate is allowed to spend as much of their personal money on a campaign as they want BUT they still need to route it through a registered account due to election laws requiring transparency.
Spending money on a campaign with any money regardless of whether it was personal or a donation when you don't disclose it would be a violation of the law (or FEC policy hard to keep track of the difference these days).
They are claiming that hush money is a campaign expenditure therefore it should have been paid out through the campaign account(s) and failure to do so is illegal shadow campaigning. If Trump had paid Cohen from the campaign account, then you could say it was "campaign money", then you could say "people donated to silence Stormy Daniels". That did not happen.
These laws are reminiscent of zoning laws in that nobody really knows what they mean and you can use them to go after anyone.
They have been twisted to attack right-tribers before, see Dinesh D'Souza.
In the case of these Cohen payments though, it is beyond all pale. A payment from a personal account to a lawyer labeled as "legal expenses" has now been declared to be "campaign spending" without any input from the FEC or anyone involved.
Basically if you went out to buy an apple, they'll claim you're trying to illegally hide campaign spending because if you don't eat you'll look unhealthy on camera and that might hurt your chances. If you said "I would have bought that apple anyway" they're saying "No you would buy something unhealthy like a snickers bar, our jury will decide these matters".
Sane people know campaign spending is when you spend money on advertisements, leaflets, mailers, campaign events. It does not include anything else that could possibly be explicable without a campaign. The Politico article you reference is stretching until you can see through it to even describe it so loosely.
As you pointed out, if non-disclosure agreements WHICH HAPPEN ALL THE TIME were always campaign spending then what about arnold schwarzenegger and the countless other examples of paid non-disclosure?
Why is it that seeking to negotiate and execute non-disclosure agreements is listed on the portfolios of thousands of lawyers? I have a theory: It's a legal practice, which means paying for it is a legal expense.
HILARIOUSLY they can't even prove Trump wanted to pay Daniels to be quiet even though he has ABSOLUTELY EVERY RIGHT TO DO THAT and TO LABEL IT "LEGAL EXPENSES"
How many hoops was that?
1.) Redefine "defrauding the voter" to include what Facebook did to the New York Post
2.) Redefine campaign spending to include pervasive legal negotiations that had never been held to be campaign spending before
3.) Ignore the fact that the underlying "crime" was never charged
4.) Redefine paying a lawyer for legal services as "anything but legal expenses"
5.) Rely only on the word of a convicted and admitted liar to establish an intent to seek a non-disclosure agreement
6.) Bring Stormy on to talk about fictional sex where she felt drugged and powerless when it's totally irreverent to the already (see 1-5) totally insane case
7.) Judge fails to recuse himself even though daughter is raising millions on getting Trump
That's seven fucking bananas on the famous Dershowitz "banana republic" scale.
