Here is more from the article cited in the OP
https://www.justsecurity.org/42956/open-door-moscow-facts-potential-criminal-case-trump-campaign-coordination-russia/
Soliciting the “Thing of Value”
To coordinate spending is to receive a contribution. It is also illegal to solicit a contribution or expenditure–any “thing of value”–from a foreign national. 52 U.S.C. 30121(a)(2); 11 C.F.R. § 110.20 (g). A solicitation also need not be express: it can be implied. It is useful to consider the regulatory definition of “solicitation” adopted by the Federal Election Commission. I have put in italics key portions:
To solicit means to ask, request, or recommend, explicitly or implicitly, that another person make a contribution, donation, transfer of funds, or otherwise provide anything of value. A solicitation is an oral or written communication that, construed as reasonably understood in the context in which it is made, contains a clear message asking, requesting, or recommending that another person make a contribution, donation, transfer of funds, or otherwise provide anything of value. A solicitation may be made directly or indirectly. The context includes the conduct of persons involved in the communication.
11 C.F.R. §300.2(m).
In sum a solicitation may be implied as well as express, and it is determined by examining all the relevant circumstances, including the context in which the communication in question is made. The President made an express appeal in public comments for Russian help, and the potential for finding an illegal contribution is reinforced by his repeated refusals to acknowledge or denounce the Russians for what the intelligence community formally found to be their program of interfering in the election. The freshly reported communications with Russian nationals add weight to the question of whether he and his campaign were really “soliciting” or just “joking.”
The Russians could reasonably understand that the campaign was very much in the market for this information. By suggesting that she had such information, a Russian national with a relationship to her government could obtain an audience with intimate associates of the candidate: his campaign manager, his son and his son-in-law. It would have been hard for the Russians to mistake the intensity of the campaign’s interest. The very scheduling of the meeting–and the status of the attendees–was sufficient to get the campaign’s point across about what it highly valued and was prepared to take from a foreign source. And if they had any doubt, it would have been resolved by the President’s public call, a little six weeks later, for the Russians, “if you’re listening,” to find the emails.
It also bears emphasis that a solicitation need not be successful in order to be illegal. The law applied here is not about an attempt, inchoate or otherwise, to commit a federal offence—the very solicitation is itself a potential crime.
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