President Trump’s response? To suggest it was just a third-rate burglary.

No, Trump didn’t use those words, but he might as well have. In a tweet Monday morning, Trump dismissed the $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels at the end of the 2016 campaign as “a simple private transaction.” The comparison mirrored Watergate-era White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler’s dismissal of the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters as a bungled burglary — i.e., a minor crime unworthy of the nation’s attention.

Other Republicans have played down the transaction, too. “To go forward and say there is an impeachable offense because of a campaign finance problem — there’s a lot of members in Congress who are going to have to leave,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) said Monday. Added Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Sunday: “If we’re going to prosecute people and put them in jail for campaign finance violations, we’re going to become a banana republic."

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But while there is such thing as a trivial campaign finance violation — and there are scores of them every year — that doesn’t mean every campaign finance violation is a small matter. Both because of the coverup that Trump waged over the payment and its potential effect, this is no trifling matter.

Let’s start with the coverup. Trump and his White House have spent nearly half of his presidency hiding this “simple private transaction” — and his role in it — from public view. When it was first reported, they denied Trump’s sexual relationship with Daniels and seemed to deny the payment, too, calling it “old, recycled reports, which were published and strongly denied prior to the election.” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in March that Trump had “made very well clear that none of these allegations are true.”

Trump himself flatly denied that he knew about the payment, saying “no” when asked that question. When asked where the money came from, he said, “I don’t know.” Federal prosecutors now say Trump knew about the whole thing from the jump, saying in its filing Friday that Cohen “acted in coordination with and at the direction of [Trump].”

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Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani has acknowledged that Trump had, in fact, reimbursed Cohen for the payment over the course of 2017, but Trump’s personal financial disclosure form that year listed no outstanding debts to Cohen. Giuliani described the payments as a legal retainer — which wouldn’t necessitate listing it as a debt — but federal prosecutors now say that it was a debt:

In fact, no such retainer agreement existed and these payments were not “legal expenses” – Cohen in fact provided negligible legal services to Individual-1 or the Company in 2017 – but were reimbursement payments.

So it’s clear that considerable thought went into obscuring this supposedly “simple private transaction.” Even if that public coverup isn’t necessarily legally problematic, it doesn’t exactly speak to the idea that this was some unimportant exchange of money.

Which brings us to the impact. Campaign finance violations such as excess contributions may indeed have negligible effects on ballots that are cast; is an extra $3,000 from a donor or three really going to sway thousands of votes? Most candidates don’t even wind up spending all their money anyway.

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A secret hush-money payment, though, carries significantly more potential effect. This was a story that could have cost Trump lots of votes — possibly even enough to tip the scales of what was a very closely decided election. Trump seemed to don his own version of political Teflon, yes, and his many controversies didn’t prevent him from being elected president. But imagine if voters had known before Election Day that Trump paid off a porn star who alleged an affair? Imagine if they knew he had allegedly had this affair while his wife was home with their young son?

It’s impossible to play out that hypothetical, just like it’s impossible to rerun a 2016 campaign in which Russia didn’t interfere to help Trump. But Trump won the three decisive states in 2016 — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — each by less than one point. If a story like the Daniels story even shifted the national electorate one percentage point across the country, Trump loses the presidency. If it affected 80,000 people across these three states, we have a different outcome.

Trump argues that this was just a personal matter, and that it wasn’t even related to the election. If so, it wouldn’t be a campaign finance violation. But Cohen now says it was, and prosecutors agree. This was a crime that was covered up, implicates the president, and could theoretically have changed the result of the election.

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