New lawsuit accuses Trump campaign of illegally attempting to hide payments to women
Donald Trump's election campaign has been hit with a sex discrimination lawsuit involving fresh accusations that his lawyers violated federal law by attempting to hide settlement payments to women accusers.
The Federal Election Commission must investigate whether the campaign illegally attempted to hide settlement payments by routing them through third parties, according to a complaint filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
The allegations of wrongdoing, first reported by The Daily Beast, stem from former Trump campaign employee AJ Delgado who gave a sworn declaration in her pending lawsuit against Trump that she was cut loose based on pregnancy discrimination.
Delgado, a former Trump 2016 campaign aide, had grabbed widespread attention by accusing longtime Trump aide Jason Miller of engaging in "a cycle of sexual coercion, rape, sexual assault, abuse, battery, sexual harassment, and sex trafficking."
Delgado and Miller had an affair and has since long accused Miller of stiffing her on child support payments. She has also claimed discrimination because she lost her job during pregnancy.
According to Delgado's filing, she also accuses Trump attorney Mark Kasowitz of admitting the campaign selected to move settlements through a law firm to keep a payout back in 2017 in an effort to dodge federal disclosure laws that mandate campaigns identify payments to recipients publicly.
“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 stated in the filing. “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.'"
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She also suspects there is enough “information and reason to believe” that Trump's campaign made payments — specifically $4.1 million that she claims flowed to Kasowitz’s law firm over a two-month period immediately following the November 2020 election.
All of these efforts were intended to keep secret from the public and the FEC more settlements with women “who raised complaints of gender discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment,” The Beast reported.
Trump is currently standing trial based on business fraud charges that involve payments allegedly made to an adult movie actress in an attempt to silence her story about a sexual relationship.
CREW president Noah Bookbinder published a statement about the lawsuit claiming Delgado’s allegations raise serious concerns about Trump potentially manifesting a scandalous cover-up.
“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. “No candidate or campaign is above the law, not even Trump.”