Trump campaign used secretive shell company led by Jared Kushner to illegally hide spending: complaint

On Thursday, Business Insider reported that the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center is alleging former President Donald Trump's family and campaign associates used a shell company to illegally conceal how they were spending election money.

The new allegations against the Trump family are detailed in a supplement to an existing federal complaint.

"The supplement, filed Thursday morning with the Federal Election Commission, is in part based on Insider's reporting in December about American Made Media Consultants, a secretive shell company that operated inside Trump's 2020 campaign committee," said the report. "American Made Media Consultants, the shell company, along with a political firm owned by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, 'served as conduits that hid the ultimate recipients of nearly half of the campaign's overall spending,' the updated complaint states. 'These schemes disguised which firms or individuals were working for Trump's committees, how much and when they were being paid, and the purposes of those payments,' it continued."

The complaint is a response to former reporting that suggested hundreds of millions of dollars flowed through this shell company, which was approved by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Trump's associates were perpetually dogged by ethics complaints both around the campaign and the administration, from allegations the former president violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution by accepting foreign gifts through payments to his businesses, to repeated violations of the Hatch Act by government employees using their platforms to engage in campaign activity.