A government watchdog group has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, following multiple reports of foreign officials receiving fundraising solicitations from the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
“Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign committee is violating black-letter federal law by sending campaign fundraising emails to foreign nationals — including foreign politicians — in at least Iceland, Scotland, Australia and Britain,” the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center said in a statement on Wednesday.
Members of the British Parliament first complained about receiving fundraising emails from the Trump this week, shortly after the billionaire returned to the U.S. from a weekend trip to Scotland. Now, lawmakers in Australia, Iceland, Denmark and Finland are claiming they, too, received email requests for donations from Trump’s campaign.
UK MPs got fundraising mails from @realDonaldTrump like us. US-Candidates are not allowed to receive foreign funding https://t.co/oUtLA0ENyh
— Ida Auken (@IdaAuken) June 29, 2016
One Australian member of parliament, Tim Watts, claimed on Twitter that he’s received more than four emails from the Trump campaign since last Friday, and that other Australian politicians have seen emails from the campaign pass through heir inboxes as well.
Four since Friday, but I’m sure there have been more that my office has just deleted as spam. pic.twitter.com/hv95jH6AJX
— Tim Watts MP (@TimWattsMP) June 29, 2016
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not return the Washington Examiner’s request for comment. Some who received the emails suggested that someone affiliated with Trump’s campaign may have purchased a list containing millions of emails without knowing it contained those belonging to some foreign lawmakers.
“Donald Trump should have known better,” CLC deputy executive director Paul S. Ryan said in a statement about his group’s FEC complaint. “It is a no-brainer that it violates the law to send fundraising emails to members of a foreign government on their official foreign government email accounts, and yet, that’s exactly what Trump has done repeatedly.”
“This is a strange and unique development that we have not seen before in campaign fundraising,” noted Fred Wertheimer, president of the non-profit Democracy 21. “The FEC needs to investigate how many of these illegal solicitations were sent, to whom they were sent, whether any illegal foreign contributions have been received and, if so, whether the contributions have been returned.”
The complaint against Trump stems from a federal election law prohibiting political candidates from soliciting campaign contributions from foreign countries and barring foreign nationals from donating to campaign committees in the U.S.
