When the Ukraine story broke, I wrote at Slate:

Putting aside whether Trump made promises in order to get Biden-related dirt, or whether his conduct counts as extortion or bribery, there is a good argument that if the facts as reported are true, Trump committed a new campaign finance crime. (Trump has already been directly implicated in Michael Cohen’s campaign finance offense related to the Stormy Daniels payment, for which the president’s former lawyer is currently serving prison time). The case against this sort of behavior as a campaign finance crime was much stronger, though, before Mueller issued his report investigating foreign interference in the 2016 elections and refused to prosecute Trump Jr.

Federal law makes it a crime for any person to “solicit” any “thing of value” from a foreign national. Could Trump pressing Ukraine’s president to help his candidacy by investigating a political rival qualify as a crime under the statute?

In a later piece, I explained that whether or not Trump committed a campaign finance crime or other crimes was secondary to the question of whether he abused his power:

The story is clear, whether we hear from the whistleblower directly or not. The president has admitted the conduct; he disputes only its wrongfulness, describing his call as “very legal and very good.” And already today there is enough for the House to conclude that the president has abused his power and is worthy of impeachment. That’s true whether or not the solicitation of foreign opposition research is a campaign finance crime—I believe it is and special counsel Robert Mueller suggested it could be illegal as well, even as he raised what he considered to be First Amendment issues—and it is true whether or not Trump’s conduct as reported in the partial summary of the conversation with Ukraine’s president amounted to the crime of extortion or bribery. The Mafia-like shakedown by Trump—along the lines of: That’s a really nice country you have; it would be a shame if something happened to it—needs to be condemned whether it amounted to a technical violation of the law or not.

The articles that the House will vote on today are for abuse of power and obstruction. They do not directly cover campaign finance crimes or bribery. But while the 658-page House Judiciary report includes detailed analysis of bribery (and pages 117-127 discusses the view that the President committed bribery), there’s no discussion of campaign finance law violations. Indeed, the words “campaign finance” appear only four times in the report, once in relation to separate charges against Lev Parnas, and three times in relation to DOJ’s apparent determination (without public analysis) that Trump’s conduct did not violate campaign finance laws.

Why did the House not include an analysis of the campaign finance violation as part of its abuse of power analysis, as it did with bribery? Perhaps there was not time for it given everything else that had to come together for this vote to be held now. But I think the answer may be that the public does not take campaign finance violations seriously. They are seen as “technical” violations that are a lot harder to sell to the public than bribery, abuse of power, or obstruction. And, as I mentioned in my first linked article above, Trump may have a First Amendment defense to seeing this conduct as a campaign finance crime.

But I do think there is a danger here of not calling out the campaign finance violation. As I wrote when Mueller refused to pursue Trump Jr. for campaign finance violations stemming from the Trump Tower meeting with Russian operatives:

[E]ven if Mueller believed there were First Amendment questions in play, he should have left that for the courts to decide given the strong national security interests at stake here. Mueller offered no First Amendment argument in his report. He merely flagged the issue and never provided any analysis to back up the First Amendment claim.

I’m afraid that this flagging of the issue does more harm than good. Mueller has now given campaigns credible reason to believe they can accept help from foreign governments because they may have a constitutional right to do so. That’s even more troubling for what it says about 2020 than what it says about 2016