Former President Donald Trump’s campaign has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) this week which accuses both president Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris of breaking campaign finance laws after Harris received the ability to tap into more than $91 million in the Democrat’s campaign coffers.
Biden’s campaign quickly turned into the “Harris for President” campaign, after Biden ended his re-election campaign on Sunday. The Independent reports that Biden notified the FEC that his committee was changing its name to Harris for President, with Harris as the beneficiary.
Trump campaign general counsel David Worrington wrote the complaint which reads:
“This is little more than a thinly veiled $91.5 million excessive contribution from one presidential candidate to another, that is, from Joe Biden’s old campaign to Kamala Harris’s new campaign,” accusing Harris of “seeking to perpetrate a $91.5 million dollar heist of Joe Biden’s leftover campaign cash — a brazen money grab that would constitute the single largest excessive contribution and biggest violation in the history of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, as amended.”
Among the arguments in the complaint, Trump’s counsel argues Harris is not in a position to inherit contributions because she is not yet officially the Democratic Party’s nominee, and that the campaign’s treasurer “attempted fraud” by using government documents to “rename and repurpose” Biden’s committee.
The Independent reports that just moments after Biden announced he was ending his re-election campaign, Trump-appointed FEC chair Sean Cooksey posted an excerpt of campaign finance law that requires contributions to a candidate for the general election be refunded or redesignated if that candidate doesn’t run.
A group of House Democrats sent him a letter on Tuesday to clarify campaign finance law, warning that his statements could risk fueling “uncertainty and mistrust” in the nation’s campaign finance system and “our democracy more generally.”
“All I did was quote federal regulations,” he wrote in response on X. “Why are Democrats afraid of the law?”
Legal analysts who doubt the arguments at the heart of Trump’s assertion say that because Harris was Biden’s running mate, she was already ‘sharing’ the millions.