The Republican National Committee is handing over $37,000-a-month to the Trump Organization in order to rent out an office in Trump Tower in Manhattan to ‘prepare for the President’s re-election campaign.’
The RNC is also paying about $12,000-a-month to Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew, John Pence, for his role as the campaign’s deputy executive director.
According to Federal Election Commission reports, an additional one-off payment of $9,000 for ‘strategy consulting’ was made in December, according to CNBC.
It means that almost $600,000-a-year is flowing into the pockets of the campaign all under the guise of ‘re-election’.
President Trump is seen with Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel in December
The money amounts to almost $300,000 in office space and Pence’s salary since September and will be well over half-a-million dollars in less than a year.
The scheme is allowed under the law and all the finances are apparently being reported accurately but many are questioning how appropriate the payments are which effectively sees the campaign paying money directly into President Trump’s bank account.
‘This is permissible and it’s being reported properly, but why they are doing it is a mystery,’ said Brendan Fischer of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center to the New York Daily News.
‘Why would the RNC be blowing through their allowed expenditures now, on something the campaign can easily afford?’ Fischer said.
‘Did they think they needed to show loyalty to Trump by paying the rent at the building Trump owns?’
The RNC is using campaign money to rent office space in Trump Tower and employing Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence at a cost of $600,000 a year
The FEC is taking a closer look at the payments: ‘It looks to me like the RNC is shuttling cash around to benefit Trump and the vice president’s family in ways that are pretty unprecedented,’ said Stephen Spaulding, a former special counsel at the FEC.
The RNC first started paying for Trump’s bills in September but it had previously been footing Trump’s legal fees.
$230,000 went to John Dowd and Jay Sekulow, two lawyers representing Trump in the special counsel’s investigation into ties between the Kremlin and his 2016 campaign.
When the report emerged, officials questioned whether the legal defense fund was being used properly and the payments stopped.
Yet Trump and the RNC are able to get away with paying over the vast sums of cash because the Trump campaign never ended.
Trump filed the paperwork to run for re-election the day he was inaugurated, the first president ever to do so.
Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, did not formally launch his re-election campaign until April 2011, after serving more than two full years in office.