You may be right that they were political in that sense.
But also, they probably should have happened were he not a politician. He's been committing fraud and other white collar crimes for quite a while. Unfortunately, we go far too easy on white collar crime in this country. And he's a master of plausible deniability, where he effectively asks other people to commit crimes on his behalf, but in a plausibly deniable way with no written trail.