A "legal question" was flagged over $45,000 cash gifts President Donald Trump gave to executive assistant Natalie Harp and two other White House aides, a former Florida prosecutor said.
The gifts appear in annual financial disclosure reports the White House published last week and were first reported Tuesday by The Washington Post.
Harp's form lists Donald J. Trump of Palm Beach, Florida, as the source and describes the money only as a "cash gift for the holidays."
Communications adviser Margo Martin and deputy director of Oval Office operations Chamberlain Harris each reported the same $45,000 payment on their own disclosure forms. All three are paid $150,000 a year, according to the White House's annual salary report to Congress.
A fourth aide, director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta, reported a $20,000 gift from the president, the Associated Press reported. Nauta, who once served as Trump's valet, earns $175,000 a year.
The three filings do not agree on where the money came from. Harp and Martin both give Trump's address as Palm Beach, while Harris lists it as Washington, D.C., according to Forbes.
The White House answered publicly Tuesday night, when its press office posted a statement on X.
"The President has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit, including at times employees and aides, both in government and in his time in the private sector," a White House spokesperson said in the statement.
"The gifts at issue here have nothing to do with any of these individuals' official government duties, and, therefore, are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards," the statement continued.
A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity gave the Associated Press the same explanation, but would not say whether any other staffers had received money from the president.
"The sheer size of these payments raises a legitimate ethics and legal question," Dave Aronberg, a former state attorney for Palm Beach County, told Newsweek.
"Federal law generally prohibits a government employee from having his or her federal salary supplemented by a private source, and $45,000 is a lot different from giving someone a Christmas sweater or a bottle of wine," Aronberg said.
"The critical question would be why President Trump gave them the money," Aronberg continued. "If these were genuinely personal holiday gifts unrelated to their White House work, that is a much stronger defense."
"But if the money was effectively a bonus or additional compensation for their government service, it could implicate the federal salary-supplementation law, which applies to both receiving and paying prohibited compensation. That could potentially lead to an ethics investigation, civil penalties and, in a sufficiently serious case and in a different time, criminal scrutiny."
Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told The Washington Post that the payments could violate that same federal ban on private money topping up a government worker's pay, Newsweek reported. The Post described Painter as a known critic of Trump.
Don Fox, a former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics under President Barack Obama, said the facts available so far do not make a violation clear, Newsweek reported. He still called the payments "troublesome," because money on that scale could leave the recipients feeling indebted to the president.
The disclosures surfaced weeks after Harp's closeness to the president became a campaign-trail attack line, Forbes reported.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) named Harp at a rally in Georgia in August while mocking the president's priorities, The Hill reported. Ossoff is seeking reelection against Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), whom Trump has endorsed.
"He doesn't want to do the job," Ossoff said of the president at the rally. "He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar."
Allies of the president defended Harp in the days that followed, and Ossoff was asked about the backlash that Wednesday, The Hill reported.
"No one cares about their feelings," Ossoff said.
Harp is a former host at the right-wing One America News Network, Forbes reported. Her habit of handing the president printouts of news articles and social media posts during the 2024 campaign earned her the nickname "human printer."
Harp also types many of the president's Truth Social posts as he dictates them, Forbes reported. She was among the small group of aides who traveled with Trump in July when he was secretly moved off Air Force One and onto a smaller plane while leaving Turkey, amid fears of a threat from Iran.
Martin has worked for Trump since his first term, when she started as a White House press assistant, the Associated Press reported. She followed him to Palm Beach to help run his media operations after he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, then returned to the White House with him after the 2024 race.
Trump appointed Harris this year to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the federal panel that has oversight of the White House ballroom project Ossoff mocked, the Associated Press reported.
Nauta was charged in 2023, alongside Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira, with conspiring with Trump to obstruct an FBI investigation into classified documents the president took with him when he left the White House after his first term, the Associated Press reported. The charges were dismissed in 2024.