A watchdog group has called on the Federal Election Commission to investigate allegations that lawyers for former President Donald Trump covered up payments to women in additon to the alleged money to Stormy Daniels in violation of federal law.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint Friday with the FEC calling for the probe. It cited claims made by Trump's 2016 campaign aide A.J. Delgado earlier this week in a sworn court declaration in her pending discrimination lawsuit against Trump and the campaign, the Daily Beast reported.
Delgado alleged that Marc Kasowitz, a Trump lawyer, admitted that the campaign wanted to use a law firm to make a potential settlement payment to her in 2017 that was designed to skirt federal disclosure laws requiring that campaigns publicly report the identities of payment recipients, the Daily Beast said.
"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 said.
"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,'" she said.
CREW's complaint — which targets the campaign's Make American Great Again PAC — went on to say that Delgado "further alleges that payments made to the lawyer's firm and another entity were to pay settlements of, and legal services related to, complaints of gender discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment."
"Federal law requires that political committees accurately report the recipients and disbursements of their funds. In violation of this law, Make American Great Again PAC falsely attributed payments to conduits utilized solely to prevent the disclosure of the true recipient and purpose of its disbursement," the CREW complaint stated.
CREW noted that Trump is currently on trial in Manhattan criminal court for alleged hush-money payments made weeks before the 2016 election to keep former porn star Stormy Daniels from going public with her accusations of a sexual affair with Trump years earlier.
Noah Bookbinder, CREW's president, told the Daily Beast that Delgado's accusations raise the possibility of wrongdoing.
"The allegations made in AJ Delgado's declaration paint a deeply troubling picture of potentially illegal activity carried out by Donald Trump's campaign. The FEC must conduct an investigation to determine the validity of these claims and establish the degree to which any wrongdoing occurred," Bookbinder said.
Requests for comments sent to the Trump campaign and Delgado were unanswered.
Benson Torres, a spokesperson for Kasowitz, said: "Ms. Delgado's accusations that there were FEC violations or that the firm acted as a 'middleman' to 'hid[e] settlement payments to women' from the Campaign are pure fantasy and false."
