It seems that every time we look at the legal maneuverings that reflect upon President Donald Trump, the allegations of unlawful behavior by him add up. We know that two teams of federal prosecutors are examining his pre-presidential and his in-office behavior.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether Trump and his campaign reached an agreement with any foreign nationals — particularly Russians — to receive anything of value and whether he obstructed justice by trying to shut down an FBI investigation of his first national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. And federal prosecutors in Manhattan are looking at bank fraud and campaign financing fraud.

The receipt by a campaign for federal office of anything of value from a foreign national is a criminal act, as is an agreement to receive the thing of value from a foreign national, whether or not it arrives. As is the case with nearly all federal crimes, one can be prosecuted for committing the crime itself or, when others are involved, for conspiring to commit the crime or for attempting to commit it.

The career federal prosecutors in New York have told a federal judge that they have evidence that Trump conspired with Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, and David Pecker, his former friend who owns the National Enquirer, to violate campaign finance laws. They have also told the judge that Trump orchestrated Cohen's crimes and paid Cohen to commit them. The prosecutors know that he who pays for crimes can be as criminally liable as he who accepts the payment and commits the crimes.

What were the crimes? They consisted in hiding illegal campaign receipts and expenses from federal regulators and deceiving them. The receipts were corporate donations — prohibited under federal law. The expenses were payments made to two women who claim to have been paramours of Trump's — claims he has repeatedly denied — in return for their silence in the fall of 2016, all done to benefit Trump's presidential campaign.

Had these receipts and payments been innocent mistakes or clerical errors, they could have been addressed with fines and returning the money — about $350,000 — to the donors. They became criminal because the donations were part of an elaborate scheme of cooked books and phony invoices to deceive federal regulators, and they resulted in the Trump campaign's filing false reports to the feds. All of this was done, according to federal prosecutors, knowingly and intentionally pursuant to a conspiracy among Trump, Cohen and Pecker.

What became of the conspirators? Cohen infamously pleaded guilty to this and other crimes and was sentenced to three years in a federal prison. When Trump learned that his former lawyer had been debriefed by the FBI for 70 hours, Trump called him a "rat." Pecker received a form of immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony to federal prosecutors and to a federal grand jury about Trump and Cohen.