Three of President Donald Trump’s closest aides each pocketed a $45,000 cash gift from him — and Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, says the money was no gift at all, but an illegal supplement to their federal salaries. The White House rejects that characterization. Newsweek published Painter’s remarks on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, in which he said the payments break federal law and could reach Trump himself: “President Trump could get himself impeached for it.”
What Painter offers is a legal 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 taken no action. Legal experts, meanwhile, are publicly split on whether the money runs afoul of the statute he cites, and nobody has issued an authoritative ruling.
What the Disclosures Show
Executive assistant to the president Natalie Harp listed a “cash gift for the holidays” of $45,000 from Trump. The same $45,000 figure shows up for communications adviser Margo Martin and for Chamberlain Harris, deputy director of Oval Office operations, in their financial disclosure statements. Walt Nauta, director of Oval Office operations, disclosed a separate $20,000 gift. Across the four aides, the payments add up to $155,000.
The sums stood out against what the aides are paid. Harp, Martin and Harris draw salaries of about $150,000 a year, putting $45,000 at roughly 30 percent of an annual paycheck. 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 released them in September 2026. Save America, Donald J. Trump for President 2024, Inc., and his transition operation had all paid the aides earlier, according to those same filings.
Trump’s ties to all three women stretch back well before the current administration. Harp, 35, joined his political operation in 2022 and later moved into the White House. Aides on the 2024 campaign dubbed her “the human printer”. Martin worked in Trump’s first administration and stayed on with his post-presidential staff in Florida. Harris also served in the first administration, then took a job with his political organizations before a return to the White House in 2025.
The Law at the Center of It
Painter’s argument rests on 18 U.S.C. Section 209, a 1962 federal law titled “Salary of Government officials and employees payable only by United States.” As a general matter, the provision prohibits executive branch employees from taking compensation — or a supplement to their salary — from any source other than the federal government for their work as government employees.
Retirement, insurance and other bona fide benefit programs run by a former employer are carved out. A Section 209 dispute usually turns on a single question: was the money compensation for government service, or was it provided for some other reason?
Painter reads such a transfer as wages rather than generosity: when an old employer writes a big check to a longtime staffer who has just joined the government, what changes hands is salary. “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 exposes both the employee and the person who makes the payments to criminal charges, he said, and with a five-year statute of limitations, a future Justice Department could revisit the payments even if the current one does not.
Nobody has been charged, so any penalty remains hypothetical. Violators face fines, civil penalties and up to a year in prison, or five years if the violation is willful. The Supreme Court, in a 1990 ruling, 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 went on: “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 in between. Dave Aronberg, a former Palm Beach County state attorney, said the size of the payments raises a real legal question. The decisive issue, in his view, is whether the money was compensation for government service; a genuinely personal gift, he said, would be easier to defend. An associate professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, John Ronquillo, said the sums were large enough to demand an explanation. “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 is a political process rather than a prosecution. A simple majority in the House of Representatives is enough to impeach, while conviction and removal demand two-thirds of the Senate. Republicans control 218 House seats and the Democrats’ total stands at 214, alongside one independent and two vacancies. Voters decide all 435 seats on November 3.
The House impeached him in 2019 and again in 2021, during his first term, and the Senate acquitted him both times.
The University of Minnesota Law School employs Painter as a teacher, and he held the chief White House ethics lawyer job from 2005 to 2007. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) counts him as its vice chair, and he 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. The Supreme Court ended the case as moot in January 2021, days after Trump left office.
