If we still had any pretense of enforcing election laws in this country, this could end up being a problem for Trump.
On Friday, Liberty House executive director Keith Howard received a call from a Trump campaign staffer, who conveyed that Trump would like to publicly present them with a six-figure check at a Londonderry rally on Monday, right before the Granite State primary.
Liberty House is one of the veterans' charity groups chosen to benefit from Trump's rally for veterans, the event staged to compete with the Fox News debate that Trump boycotted over Megyn Kelly's perceived rudeness to his royal Trumpness. The problem is that the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity, is ostensibly supposed to be a different beast from the Donald J. Trump political campaign. They’re supposed to stay at arm’s length.
“The campaign utilizing the foundation to help support and promote campaign events is a potential legal problem for both the campaign and the Trump Foundation,” said Larry Noble, general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.
The value of the work the foundation did to assist the campaign event could be considered an illegal campaign contribution. And the foundation is barred from getting involved in political activity, such as supporting a campaign rally, he continued. “Neither the foundation nor other charities should be working hand-in-hand with the campaign to promote Trump’s campaign events.”
The campaign and Liberty House were eventually able to agree on a method of donation that would not require the charity to appear with Trump, since Liberty House director Keith Howard was concerned that associating his charity with any specific political campaign would endanger the group's nonprofit status. But the more specific question is whether Trump's campaign and Trump's own charitable foundation stepped over the bounds of campaign law by working in tandem to promote, well, Donald Trump.
It's unlikely that anything will come of it, if we're being honest, because we simply do not enforce such laws (as evidence, see CARLY for America.) But maybe at some point it will be the subject of a sternly worded letter?