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Intent can't be proven in any of the three scenarios you put forward because buying paperclips isn't illegal, and legal impossibility is almost always a complete defense. In any event, whether you think something is legal or not is irrelevant, because in most cases, mistake of law isn't a defense. Ignorantia juris non excusat. What's tripping people up here is that the crime Trump was allegedly concealing has very specific intent requirements that does require knowledge of the law, while the crimes he was actually charged with don't. The relevant analogy here is where buying paperclips actually is illegal. In that case, if you falsified records relating to their purchase you'd be guilty of the falsification whether you knew they were illegal or not.
So "intent to conceal a crime," in your opinion, only occurs when there is a real crime to be concealed? And not when someone intends to conceal a crime but that crime doesn't actually exist? So the defendant would have to be aware of the reality of the crime and that their actions are intended to conceal a real crime?
My analogy was meant to get at one aspect of this that is blurry: What crime did Trump think he was attempting to conceal via the falsifications (jury instructions: don't think about this, just assume there was a crime)? My guess is that it's a wild overestimation of Trump's knowlege of FEC law to come to the conclusion that he was being mindful of the contorted violation to which Cohen pled in his deal (which may or may not even be a real crime).
In my model of Trump, he was only ever going to do something to conceal his own culpability, and certainly not Cohen's, who he was allegedly also planning on screwing out of reimbursement. Trump had to suspect that he was guilty of something that needed concealing, which would be what? Since he was not charged with concealing a crime with which he himself was charged or convicted, or to which he had pled -- all of which would have made the prosecution's case much easier -- I'm guessing it was something that was not actually a crime but which he mistook as something that might be illegal, like the payments to Daniels. the only other alternative, is that he was attempting to conceal something embarassing but not criminal, in which case there is no felony.
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I think this is actually where you are getting tripped up. Yes generally ignorance of the law is no excuse. If buying paper clips are illegal, then the only intent I need to prove is that the person intended to commit the act of buying paper clips.
But the act here isn’t that the falsification of the business records furthered hiding another crime; it is that the intent is to hide another crime. Intent is part of the element. So if you had no clue the other thing was a crime you can’t intend to commit the other crime.
This goes back to the question of inference which is inappropriate here given that unlike say breaking in there are a zillion reasons why one might falsify business records (including sloppiness).
I think you're assuming that intent to commit a crime requires knowledge of the criminal nature of the underlying act, when that's not the case (except in limited circumstances). To go back to the burglary example, suppose a thief breaks into a house with the intention of stealing a watch worth $800. The value of the watch isn't in dispute. The burglary statute requires intent to commit a felony, and the larceny statute makes it a felony to steal goods valued over $500. If the defendant is charged with burglary, he won't get the burglary charge dismissed by demonstrating that he genuinely believed that the statute only made it a felony if the item was worth over $1,000, arguing that because of his mistake of law he only intended to commit a misdemeanor and not a felony. To go back to the paper clip example and tie it into the New York statute at issue, suppose it's illegal to buy paperclips, and a junior executive at a company notices that one of his underlings bought paperclips. He doesn't know that this is illegal, but knows that his boss, the CEO, said that it was against company policy to buy them, so he forges documents making it look like the purchase was for something else. He can't argue that he didn't intend to conceal a crime because he didn't know what he was doing was a crime. He intended to conceal the purchase, which happens to be a crime, and he accordingly intended to conceal evidence of a crime; his knowledge of the legality of the underlying activity isn't relevant here.
The consistent analogies to burglary dont make sense in this context. Because a campaign finance violation is extremely technical. If I am making campaign expenses and regular business expenses, I, by definition, will be making both types of expenses and categorizing them.
Your argument, as far as I can tell, is that the existence of a law that contemplates legal penalties for mischaracterization of the expenses is enough to elevate the misdemeanor to a felony. Because no on has proven the characterization of this expense as a business expense instead of a campaign expense was incorrect, the only thing proven is that part of the expense should have been filed as repayment of a loan and another part should have been legal expenses, but they instead classified it all as legal expenses.
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I’m not sure that is a fair reading here.
Notwithstanding any of that, the underlying crime (ie the FECA violation) has a knowing and willful standard. So it seems hard to say that an “unlawful means” is accidentally doing something that requires knowledge that something is wrong.
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