How the Supreme Court Made It Easier For Trump To Silence The Porn Actress and The Playboy Centerfold He Shagged At the Same Celebrity Golf Tournament While His Wife Nursed His Newborn Son

If Donald Trump is acquitted, blame Citizens United.

Karen McDougal in happier times.

It could happen to anyone. You’re running for president and suddenly every broad you ever lured into bed with empty promises to open a few doors in show business thinks she owns a piece of you. So off goes $130,000 to Stormy Daniels and $150,000 to Karen McDougal. This, of course, is the very classy narrative at the heart of the first indictment of a former president in American history, due to be unsealed Tuesday in New York City.

The part of the story that hasn’t gotten much attention is that these were payments made by corporate entities: the Trump Organization (whose former CFO, now serving a five-month sentence at Rikers, helped facilitate); American Media, Inc., former owner of National Enquirer, whose CEO David Pecker was a “catch and kill” virtuoso; and a couple of shell corporations created on the fly by Michael Cohen, a Trump Organization lawyer who did a year in the federal pen in Otisville, N.Y., followed by two years of home confinement, after singing like a canary to federal prosecutors who had him by the balls.

When John Edwards got caught up in a similar scheme in 2007, the payoffs came not from corporate entities but from two individuals, Bunny Mellon and Fred Baron. Neither was available to testify at Edwards’ trial on federal charges of making an undisclosed campaign contribution in the form of hush money to Edwards’s former mistress Rielle Hunter, who bore him a child out of wedlock; Mellon was too old (101) and Baron had died of cancer. That probably helped Edwards beat the rap. But Edwards probably would have much preferred to funnel the payments less conspicuously through one corporate entity or other, as Trump did. That option was not easily available, though, because doing so would have compounded his legal exposure in a way it wouldn’t have three years later when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United, which legalized political contributions from corporations. Trump has it easier. That’s the subject of my latest piece in the New Republic. You can read it here.