A complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission Tuesday by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center asserts that the Trump campaign and its joint fundraising committee with the R.N.C., the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, have violated federal election reporting requirements.
Senior Trump campaign officials, the complaint alleges, have “disguised over $170 million dollars of campaign spending by laundering the funds through firms headed by Trump’s recent campaign manager, Brad Parscale” and other Trump campaign officials—including Sean Dollman, the Trump campaign’s director of operations, and Alex Cannon, a special counsel to the campaign.
“The Trump campaign is violating the law,” Trevor Potter, a Republican and a former chairman of the FEC, told VICE News.
In the official language of campaign finance, corporations that receive campaign payments are called “vendors.”
Earlier reporting has indicated Trump family members and associates like Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of eldest son Donald Trump Jr., and Lara Trump, wife of middle son Eric Trump, are already being paid large sums by the campaign through Parscale Strategy.
Holman, and other campaign finance experts interviewed, imagined troublesome scenarios of what the Trump campaign’s network could be shielding from public view.
The Campaign Legal Center’s complaint is that the Trump campaign is breaking a transparency-focused disclosure law and not to its knowledge breaking other election laws. »