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It's not clear who wrote the $237,000 check, and it's unusual for a presidential candidate's spouse to be paid for speaking during a campaign. And at least one ethics expert is calling the former first lady "self-serving."
New questions are being raised about the $237,500 fee former First Lady Melania Trump was paid for speaking at a Log Cabin Republicans event.
It was initially reported that the payment came from the Palm Beach Chapter of Log Cabin Republicans. She spoke at an April 20 event at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where she and her husband, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, claim full-time residency.
But now “it’s a mystery who actually cut the check,” CNN reports. Charles Moran, president of the national Log Cabin Republicans, told CNN that the group did not fund the payment, and Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosure form offers no additional information.
It’s unclear whether Melania Trump was paid for speaking at another Log Cabin event, held in July, but there was at least one request to a donor, according to CNN. A source told the network that Richard Grenell, a gay man who was ambassador to Germany in Donald Trump’s administration, was the one making the request. Grenell did not respond to several CNN requests for comment, and Melania Trump’s spokesperson comment.
The former first lady was also paid $250,000 for a Log Cabin event in December 2022, and she received two other payments of at least that amount for speaking to groups that month, according to earlier financial disclosure forms viewed by CNN. One of the groups, Fix California, was founded by Grenell. These events took place just after Donald Trump announced he was running for the presidency again.
The events were fundraisers for the groups involved and not for Donald Trump’s campaign. Still, “campaign finance and government ethics experts say a payment to a presidential candidate’s spouse to appear at political fundraisers in an election is unusual, ethically questionable and should, at the very least, be properly noted in the disclosure forms,” CNN reports.
“It seems pretty self-serving. From my own general observation, I’m not used to seeing that,” Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, told the network.
“You could indicate that payment was for a speaking engagement for the Log Cabin Republicans, but you also need to report who the source of the payment was, otherwise you can’t assess for the conflicts of interest, and it wouldn’t be in compliance with the rules,” she added. “It should have properly been reported so that the source of the income is listed for the honorarium.”
