President Donald Trump’s $45,000 cash gifts to three of his closest aides were never gifts at all but an illegal supplement to their federal salaries, according to Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush. His assessment, published on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, is one the White House rejects.
Painter told Newsweek the payments break federal law and could carry consequences for the president himself: “President Trump could get himself impeached for it.”
What Painter offers is a lawyer’s opinion — not a court ruling, and not a proceeding. Nobody has filed an impeachment resolution. Congress has opened no inquiry, and the Justice Department has done nothing. Legal specialists are publicly split on whether the statute Painter cites covers the money, and nobody with authority has ruled.
What the Disclosures Show
A “cash gift for the holidays” worth $45,000, handed over by Trump, appears on the filing of Natalie Harp, executive assistant to the president. Financial disclosure statements show the same $45,000 figure reported by Communications adviser Margo Martin and by Chamberlain Harris, deputy director of Oval Office operations. A separate $20,000 gift was disclosed by Walt Nauta, director of Oval Office operations, which puts the combined total for the four aides at $155,000. financial disclosure statements
The scale of the money is what drew attention. Harp, Martin and Harris each earn about $150,000 a year, so $45,000 amounts to roughly 30 percent of an annual salary. Nauta is paid $175,000, which leaves his $20,000 gift closer to 11 percent of his pay.
The four forms cover 2025, and the administration put them out in September 2026. Public financial disclosure filers must report gifts from any single source totaling more than $480 during the reporting period, subject to exclusions. Those same filings show the aides had earlier drawn paychecks from his transition operation, from Save America or from Donald J. Trump for President 2024, Inc.
Each of the three women had worked for Trump long before the current administration. His political operation took on Harp, 35, in 2022, and she later moved into the White House; “the human printer” was the nickname she picked up during the 2024 campaign, earned by carrying a portable printer and handing the candidate printed news articles and social media posts. Martin served in Trump’s first administration and stayed with his post-presidential staff in Florida. Harris served in the first administration, later worked for his political organizations and returned to the White House in 2025.
The Law at the Center of It
The provision Painter points to dates to 1962: 18 U.S.C. Section 209, titled “Salary of Government officials and employees payable only by United States.” Broadly, the statute forbids anyone in the executive branch from taking compensation, or a supplement to their salary, from any source other than the federal government in return for the work they do as government employees.
Not every financial benefit is off limits. Bona fide retirement, insurance and other benefit programs run by former employers remain open to employees, and several specific government programs and circumstances are carved out by the law itself. A Section 209 dispute usually comes down to a single question: was the money compensation for government service, or was it provided for some other reason?
A large sum handed to a longtime employee by a former boss after that employee enters government is salary rather than a present, Painter argues. “Employers and employees don’t have gift-giving relationships,” he told Newsweek. “If your employer gives you $50,000 at the end of the year, that’s not a gift, that is salary.” The statute reaches both the employee and whoever makes the payments, either of whom could be criminally charged, he said, and a five-year statute of limitations would leave the payments open to review by a future Justice Department even if the current one declines.
Nobody has been charged, so any penalty remains hypothetical. Violators face fines, civil penalties and a prison term under federal law that can run as long as a year — stretching to five years when the violation is willful — and a court may be asked by the Justice Department to order a halt to conduct that breaches the statute. A 1990 ruling by the Supreme Court held that Section 209 did not reach certain payments made before the recipients became government employees.
The White House Pushes Back
In a statement, the White House said: “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 statement continued: “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.”
Other specialists land somewhere in between. Dave Aronberg, a former Palm Beach County state attorney, said the size of the payments raises a real legal question, and that the decisive issue is whether the money was compensation for government service; a genuinely personal gift, he said, would be easier to defend. John Ronquillo, who teaches public policy as an associate professor at the University of Maryland, said the sums were large enough to demand an explanation, telling CNN: “It’s not a trivial amount and so that should raise red flags for a lot of people,” he said, “who are watchdogs, who are ethics experts in terms of why, why is this happening.”
What Impeachment Would Require
Impeachment runs through politics, not a courtroom. A simple majority in the House of Representatives is enough to impeach; conviction and removal require a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Republicans hold 218 House seats to the Democrats’ 214, with one independent and two vacancies. All 435 seats go before voters on November 3.
This would not be new terrain for the president. The House impeached Trump in 2019 and again in 2021, during his first term, and the Senate acquitted him both times.
Painter held the chief White House ethics lawyer post from 2005 to 2007 and now teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School. He is vice chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and left the Republican Party in 2018. In 2017 he joined the legal team on a CREW lawsuit accusing Trump of violating the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. A federal judge dismissed it for lack of standing that December; an appeals panel revived it in 2019 before the full Second Circuit undid that ruling, and the Supreme Court ended the case as moot in January 2021, days after Trump left office.
