Fresh allegations that Donald Trump’s attorneys have purposefully concealed settlement payments to women in violation of federal law have surfaced in response to a sex discrimination case filed against the GOP presidential candidate.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a watchdog organization, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Friday, requesting an inquiry into the purported cover-up. A.J. Delgado, a 2016 Trump campaign aide, is included in the complaint with accusations that she made earlier this week in a sworn court declaration as part of her continuing discrimination lawsuit against Trump’s political organization.
Top Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz was shown in Delgado’s declaration to have freely acknowledged that the campaign intended to employ a law firm to conceal a possible settlement amount in 2017. According to Delgado, the structure seems to be expressly devised to avoid the repercussions of federal disclosure regulations, which mandate that campaigns disclose the names of money receivers to the public.
“In other words, the payment would be routed through a middleman, to hide the fact that the Campaign had settled, from the public and the FEC,” Delgado stated as reported by The Daily Beast. “I thus have direct, personal experience with the Defendant-Campaign hiding settlement payments to women, routing them through a ‘middleman law firm,’ which to the public would only appear as payments ‘for legal services.’”
Delgado further said that she had “information and reason to believe” that women “who raised complaints of gender discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment” had received covert settlements from other campaign contributors. According to her, those payments are connected to the $4.1 million that Kasowitz’s legal firm received over the course of the two months that followed the election in November 2020. They also involve the millions of dollars in unexplained legal reimbursements that the campaign’s compliance firm, Red Curve Solutions, received, leading to the filing of a federal complaint.
The disclosure holds particular significance since it reveals the campaign’s true motives behind this intermediary arrangement, which are to conceal the existence of a settlement from both the FEC and the general public.
The public has the right to know how political money is spent, and “schemes to hide that information undercut Americans’ faith in our political system,” CREW president Noah Bookbinder stated. “Donald Trump’s admission of using pass-through payments to hide their purpose and protect his political prospects makes it even more important that the FEC investigate. No candidate or campaign is above the law, not even Trump,” he added.
