Trump campaign 'laundered' money through corporations to hide millions in payments to president's family: complaint

On Tuesday, the Huffington Post reported that the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center is alleging President Donald Trump and his campaign are illegally making secret payments to the president's family through a network of private companies that have dispensed over $216 million.

"According to the complaint, both Trump’s reelection campaign and a related fundraising group, the 'Trump Make America Great Again Committee,' are breaking federal campaign law by running payments through former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale’s private firms as well as American Made Media Consultants, a company created specifically to place ads and buy related services for the campaign," reported S. V. Date.

"Parscale’s companies have already received $39 million from Trump’s campaign, the RNC and their joint fundraising committees, according to a HuffPost analysis of FEC filings from Jan. 20, 2017, through the end of June 2020. American Made Media Consultants has been paid $177.6 million from those same committees through that time period," continued the report. "Among those payments: $180,000 a year each to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and to Lara Trump, the wife of his second son, Eric Trump."

Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign's communications director, denied this arrangement is illegal, saying, “AMMC is a campaign vendor responsible for arranging and executing media buys and related services at fair market value.” But CLC attorney Brendan Fischer disagrees, saying, “The money is being laundered through corporations run by top Trump campaign officials ... this scheme violated the law and undermines the public’s right to know. What precisely is being hidden is unknown. We don’t know for sure.”

Questions have swirled around the Trump family's use of political money ever since the president took office, with a recent criminal investigation focusing on how cash flowed from the Trump inauguration committee to businesses held by the Trump Organization.