Annual financial disclosure forms released by the White House in early September 2026 show that Trump personally gave $45,000 in cash to each of three of his closest aides, and $20,000 to a fourth. Natalie Harp, 35, a special assistant and executive assistant to the president; Margo Martin, 31, a special assistant and communications adviser; and Chamberlain Harris, 26, deputy director of Oval Office Operations, each listed a $45,000 “Cash Gift for Holidays” from Trump. Walt Nauta, the director of Oval Office Operations and Trump's co-defendant in the classified documents case, listed $20,000. The Washington Post, which first reported the payments on September 8, noted that the three women earn $150,000 a year, so the gift amounts to 30 percent of their salary. Nauta earns $175,000. The payments total $155,000 and are described as holiday gifts, apparently for the 2025 season; no outlet has reported an exact date.
The issue is 18 U.S.C. § 209, which makes it a crime for an executive-branch employee to receive “any contribution to or supplementation of salary” for government work from any source other than the government, and equally a crime for whoever pays it. Both parties are liable, and the statute of limitations is five years.
Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, told the Post: “He's clearly trying to make it easier for them financially to work in government service at the White House. You can't do that.” And: “It's not like tipping the doorman on Fifth Avenue. These are U.S. government employees. If you want a job where you get tips, you shouldn't be working for the U.S. government.” To Newsweek: “If your employer gives you $50,000 at the end of the year, that's not a gift, that is salary.” He added that “both the employee and the person who makes the payments could be criminally charged” and that “a future Justice Department can come along and say this was an illegal gift.” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney, wrote that the gifts “violate ethics rules, which exist to promote loyalty to the United States over loyalty to one person.” Kedric Payne of the Campaign Legal Center said the law “seeks to prevent even the appearance that a government employee owes greater loyalty to a cash-paying individual than to the public they serve.”
Not every expert is certain. Don Fox, a former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, told the Post it was not clear from the available facts that the payments violate the statute, and that it would be a clear violation if they were meant to keep an aide from leaving for a better-paying private job. But he called a large payment from a superior to a subordinate “not a circumstance that OGE ever really envisioned. This just doesn't happen,” and said he would feel “somewhere between really uncomfortable and then beholden to the person who gave me such a large gift.” Sean Cooksey, a former counsel to Vice President Vance, argued the payments “pretty clearly” do not violate the gift or outside-income rules. The Post reported there are no other public instances of a U.S. president giving White House staff large cash payments, and that ethics experts were unaware of any superior-to-subordinate payment of this scale.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle: “The President has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit, including at times employees and aides, both in government and in his time in the private sector. The gifts at issue here have nothing to do with any of these individuals' official government duties, and therefore are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards.”
The disclosures also show why the beholden question is not abstract. Harris, in addition to her Oval Office role, was appointed by Trump in February 2026 to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the body that reviews the design of his White House ballroom. Nauta was indicted alongside Trump for allegedly moving boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago; the case was dismissed before trial.