As more and more legal bills come due for the former president, you may be wondering: What do campaign finance rules have to say about which money trees Donald Trump is allowed to shake in order to pay what he owes? On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick turned to election-law whisperer University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Rick Hasen for answers. This excerpt of their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Dahlia Lithwick: There are a lot of campaign finance questions that are swirling in the news that seem kind of Hasen-worthy. Part of that is, can Lara Trump drain the RNC coffers to pay off her father-in-law’s massive judgments after a pair of big losses in Manhattan? There’s the Stormy Daniels lawsuit, which is, at heart, a campaign finance case. I wonder if you just have some thoughts about where we are in this moment. We’re talking about all these things as unrelated, but in some sense it’s all related to “if campaign finance laws worked as intended, this stuff wouldn’t be so thorny and intractable and awful.”

Rick Hasen: It should be........

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