To Donald Trump, the most important trait in any of his associates is loyalty—he is, in his own words, “like, this great loyalty freak.” And though the obsession has tripped him up in the White House more than once, Trump’s outside allies still seem intent on proving themselves. Exhibit A: on Tuesday, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen told The New York Times that he paid porn star Stormy Daniels—whose real name is Stephanie Clifford—$130,000 “out of his own pocket” weeks before the presidential election. “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Cohen said in what appeared to be an attempt to clear the president’s good name. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”

Cohen’s admission follows a steady drip of revelations regarding Clifford’s alleged affair with Trump in the weeks since the The Wall Street Journal reported the existence of the payment last month. According to documents obtained by the outlet, a shell company associated with Cohen transferred the sum to Clifford around the time that the infamous Access Hollywood tape surfaced. At the time, Clifford was reportedly in talks with Good Morning America and Slate to go public with details of her alleged relationship with Trump. (Trump has denied having an affair with Clifford.)

Cohen, who has worked for the Trump Organization for more than a decade, said that his statement was in response to a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission by a nonpartisan watchdog group. “The complaint alleges that I somehow violated campaign finance laws by facilitating an excess, in-kind contribution,” Cohen wrote. “The allegations in the complaint are factually unsupported and without legal merit.”

His denial notwithstanding, Cohen’s statement incited a deluge of fresh questions about the payment to Clifford. The longtime Trump ally did not disclose to the Times if Trump was aware of the outlay. Of course, the most pressing question is whether it did, in fact, violate campaign finance laws. According to Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, a “contribution” is defined as “any gift, subscription, loan, advance, or deposit of money or anything of value made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office.” Importantly, the money does not need to pass through a campaign’s war chest to qualify as a contribution. (The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Hive.)

The best test case of this particular statute in recent memory is the John Edwards scandal, in which the former senator was indicted after it was revealed that his donors paid his pregnant mistress during the 2008 presidential election. As Thomas Frampton recently wrote for the Harvard Law Review blog, prosecutors were ultimately unable to prove that Edwards’s donors made the payments “for the purpose of influencing” the election, as opposed to covering up the affair to protect Edwards’s wife, who was suffering from cancer at the time. Edwards’s lawyers argued that there was no evidence that the senator’s mistress was on the brink of going public with details of the affair.

It’s at this point that the Trump and Edwards scandals diverge. Frampton argues that in light of Clifford’s interactions with the press and subsequent radio silence after the $130,000 payment, “At least with respect to the motivation for the payment, the evidence that was lacking in the Edwards case (and which ultimately sunk the prosecution) is abundant in Trump’s case.” In an interview with USA Today, Paul S. Ryan, the vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause, highlighted this aspect as well. “The timing of this payment is strong evidence that this was payment for the purpose of influencing an election,” as opposed to hiding the tryst from the Trump family, he said. “It was a decade-old relationship he had with her,” Ryan added. “So, why then?” (Ryan has no relation to the speaker of the house.)