Across the months following last year’s presidential election, nearly a quarter of a million dollars in Trump campaign cash went out to former New York City police chief Bernard Kerik and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, with the money meant as a reimbursement for expenses that the duo had incurred amid their efforts to support Trump’s claims of election fraud. Besides the looming ethical considerations of this arrangement, there’s another problem for Trump: as explained in The Washington Post, legal experts believe that the involvement of campaign money could seriously undercut the claims of “executive privilege” that Trump is trying to use to block access to his files.
Trump has wheeled out these executive privilege claims amid the investigation by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. In Kerik and Giuliani’s case, reimbursements for their expenses emerged only after Fox host and longtime Trump ally Jeanine Pirro spoke up in their defense to the Republican Party brass — although the money eventually came from the Trump campaign after the Republican National Committee declined to dole out the requested funds. The payments to Kerik and Giuliani ended up surpassing a collective total of $225,000, including more than $50,000 that paid for accommodations at the Willard Hotel in D.C., which was used as what’s been called a command center by allies of the then-president who were working to undercut Biden’s win.
The Post notes that the “fact that campaign funds were used to finance efforts to subvert Biden’s victory could complicate the former president’s ongoing attempt to use claims of executive privilege to shield documents and testimony from the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6, according to some legal scholars.”
Requests from the riot investigation committee for relevant documents have specifically cited Kerik and Giuliani. Former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste said that the usage of campaign money “further undermines a wildly broad assertion of executive privilege,” adding that “[executive] privilege is typically limited to the protection of communications involving a president’s official duties — not to those relating to personal or political campaign matters.” Former Justice Department official John Yoo added to the Post that “[if] he acts as a president, he gets these things we talk about — executive privilege and immunity. But if he’s acting as a candidate, he’s deprived of all of those protections.” The matter seems poised to be dealt with in court, with a lawsuit having recently been filed by Trump in an attempt to block his administration’s records from the riot investigation committee. Read more here.
