This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, September 3rd, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President's former personal attorney Michael Cohen says he paid off adult film actress Stormy Daniels at the

direction of his client Donald Trump. If the claim is true, is that a crime and is

it an impeachable offense? Taking these questions in turn and understanding what

impeachment is supposed to be is vitally important. That from Cato's

Gene Healy we spoke last week. Michael Cohen is no longer Donald Trump's personal attorney.

Donald Trump took the not particularly extraordinary step for him

and said if you're looking for a good lawyer essentially don't hire

Michael Cohen and Michael Cohen is now I suppose a an asset of the special counsel. So what happened? What does that mean?

Yeah, he used to be referred to as Trump's fixer and now he's sort of got Donald Trump in a jam. So last week Cohen

pled guilty to a number of offenses, the most relevant of which is excessive campaign

contribution in the form of a $130,000 hush money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, which Cohen said

the payment was made at the direction of a candidate for federal office, which was Donald Trump.

So the issue is that Trump's former attorney has pled guilty to a felony violation of

campaign finance law and implicated the president in that violation.

And that's why people are talking about this

as a new development that will tend to spur or give new strength to calls for impeachment.

So what's the case to be made that this actually did circumvent campaign finance law?

Well, that's, the interesting thing is you can argue this both ways, both as a criminal

matter and as an issue of impeachable offenses which don't

necessarily involve criminal matters.

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