Washington — Former President Donald Trump has made a series of false and misleading claims regarding campaign finance laws, former President Barack Obama, and his onetime lawyer Michael Cohen — remarks that have drawn sharp rebukes from legal experts and fact-checkers.
Trump has repeatedly asserted that the campaign finance violations tied to Cohen’s hush-money payments during the 2016 election were not illegal, claiming they were comparable to technical violations during Obama’s 2008 campaign. However, legal analysts note that the comparison is inaccurate.
The Obama campaign’s case involved reporting delays that were later corrected and settled with a civil fine, while Cohen’s actions constituted a deliberate effort to conceal payments made to influence an election — a felony offense under federal law. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to violating campaign finance statutes, tax evasion, and lying to Congress, directly implicating Trump in the process.
Despite this, Trump has maintained that the payments were “private transactions” and has sought to distance himself from the legal fallout, insisting that he acted within the law. Yet court documents and Cohen’s sworn testimony suggest that the payments were coordinated to prevent damaging stories from surfacing before Election Day — a clear violation of election rules.
Trump has also repeated unsubstantiated claims that the Justice Department “let Obama off the hook” for worse offenses, a statement that has no factual basis. Federal Election Commission records show that Obama’s campaign addressed its violations through standard civil procedures, without evidence of intentional wrongdoing.
Legal experts warn that Trump’s efforts to conflate vastly different legal scenarios may further mislead the public about how campaign finance laws work. “These are not equivalent cases,” said one election law specialist. “One involved clerical errors, the other a deliberate attempt to hide politically motivated payments.”
The repeated distortion of these facts underscores how misinformation about campaign finance law continues to shape political discourse — and how accountability depends on separating verifiable legal outcomes from self-serving narratives.
