US President Donald Trump gave $45,000 cash gifts to three young, loyal White House employees “for the holidays,” including executive assistant Natalie Harp, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing financial disclosures released by the Trump administration.
The three women all earn $150,000 salaries from their White House positions, according to an annual report to Congress.
Former chief White House ethics lawyer for then-president George W. Bush, Richard Painter, told WaPo that the payments may violate a federal statute prohibiting the supplementation of federal employees’ salaries from outside sources.
“He’s clearly trying to make it easier for them financially to work in government service at the White House. You can’t do that,” Painter told WaPo.
Former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) during the Obama administration said that the payments may not have violated the prohibition, and would only have done so if Trump made the gifts in order to keep one of the employees after they expressed that they couldn’t live on what they were making and would move to the private sector, according to the report.
White House claims payments part of longstanding practice
The White House pushed back on the idea that the payments violated any rules.
“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,” WaPo cited White House spokesperson Davis Ingle as saying.
“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.”
While there are rules against employees giving gifts to superiors, a large payment to an employee from a superior is “not a circumstance that OGE ever really envisioned,” Fox said. “This just doesn’t happen.”
According to WaPo’s report, there have been no other public incidents of US presidents giving White House staff large cash payments, and government ethics experts said they were unaware of any other payments of this scale from a superior to a subordinate government worker.
Aides all worked for Trump between terms
Harp, Trump’s 35-year-old aide, known as the ‘human printer’ due to her carrying around a portable printer to provide Trump with hard copies of news articles and social media posts, came under public attention after it was reported that she was among the few staffers who accompanied Trump on a catering truck transporting him between planes leaving Turkey following a potential Iranian assassination threat.
In addition to Harp, 31-year-old communications advisor Margo Martin, who, according to WaPo, often gets closer to Trump than his Secret Service security detail to film him for social media, and 26-year-old Chamberlain Harris, a White House aide who serves as Trump’s executive assistant, according to the report.
Harris was appointed to the US Commission of Fine Arts, which oversees Trump’s White House ballroom and other Washington-area construction projects in February.
Director of Oval Office Operations Walt Nauta received a $20,000 gift from Trump, according to the report.
Nauta served as a valet in the first Trump administration and was a key witness and co-defendant in the Justice Department’s probe of Trump’s handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
All four employees worked for Trump between his first and second terms and have ties to Trump dating back to his first administration.
