Yeah, but are felonies really crimes?

In the President's defense, lots of things
are illegal. It's easy to loose track.

Calm down everybody. The President didn't commit a crime. Unless of course it's a crime to direct your lawyer to pay women for their silence with the intent of keeping your extra marital affairs from the public in the days and weeks leading up to an election because you think that the conservatives you conned into supporting you might stay home on election day if they knew what a sleaze you are is a crime. But if that's a crime, I don't know what to believe in any more.

Above: the mood among the President's
legal team earlier today. Well, at least
among those not going to jail. Yet.

It turns out that all that's a big huge federal offense, and that the President just admitted to it to Fox News's Ainsley Earhardt in an interview in which he's insisting to her how not guilty of crimes he is:

"...and they [the hush money payments] weren't taken out of the campaign finance, that's the big thing. That's a much bigger thing. Did they come out of the campaign? They didn't come out of the campaign, they came from me."

-The President, admitting to a felony

Yeah, so in the interview, due to air tomorrow, he lie'splains to Earhardt that because the hush money came from his own pocket it's all good which, according to this, is not at all the case. In fact, it's the opposite of the case. Apparently he would have been ok if he'd funneled the money through the campaign, but then it's tough to funnel hush money through something with public accounting records. It un-hushes it.

Holy shit, wouldn't it just be the best if a
Fox News interview was what finally did it? 

Also, he kind of makes it sound like the
conviction just happened to Manafort, but
 didn't he commit like a bunch of crimes?

Incidentally, the headline story on Fox News as I write this is not the President discussing the finer points of concealing affairs from the public on the eve of an election by making illegal campaign contributions through a lawyer or whatever, it's the fact that the man accused of murdering Mollie Tibbits might be an illegal immigrant. Might be. That actually has yet to be established, but that didn't stop Newt Gingrich from chiming in with how this case is "...historically far more important than what happened to Paul Manafort." Really? More important than the President committing a felony and then chatting about it on Fox News?

Hey, you don't suppose Gingrich is trying to distract us by trotting out the discredited and racist assertion that illegal immigrants commit more crimes than citizens, do you? I mean, I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions about a guy who went after a different President for lying about an affair while he himself was cheating on his wife and is now handwaving the current President's multiple affairs and subsequent pay-offs to cover it up but...but...no, now that I think about it, I do want to jump to conclusions.

Yup, he was cheating on his 2nd wife, Marianne Ginthner, during the
Clinton impeachment. Oh, and Ginthner had been recently diagnosed with
 MS. Oh, oh! And he'd started seeing her while married to his first wife.