President Donald Trump gave executive assistant Natalie Harp and two other close White House aides $45,000 each in cash gifts last Christmas, according to newly released financial disclosures.
On the disclosure forms released publicly late last week, the three women described the payments as “Cash Gift for Holidays,” as first reported by The Washington Post. The gifts amount to nearly a third of the $150,000 annual salaries they each receive from the White House. Deputy Director of Oval Office Operations Chamberlain Harris and White House Communications Advisor Margo Martin were the other two White House employees to disclose the $45,000 gifts.
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All three are among Trump’s closest aides, with desks just outside the Oval Office, and frequently accompany the president at meetings and on trips, according to The Wall Street Journal. Director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta, who makes $175,000 a year, disclosed a $20,000 cash gift from Trump, the Journal reports.
Is it legal?
The disclosures have raised questions about whether the cash gifts violate federal law.
Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, argues the gifts violate 18 U.S. Code § 209, which generally prohibits federal employees from receiving outside compensation as a supplement to their government salaries. Painter, who has been critical of Trump, 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.”
Sean Cooksey, who served as counsel to Vice President JD Vance from January 2025 to February 2026, disputes that interpretation.
“I am begging journalists to stop holding out Richard Painter—former Democratic candidate for Congress (that never gets noted)—as an ethics expert. He’s not and he’s often wrong,” Cooksey wrote in a post on X Wednesday. “Also this pretty clearly doesn’t violate the ethics laws on gifts or outside incomes.”
Painter told the Post that a holiday gift from an employer to an employee can be considered part of the employee’s compensation.
“It’s not like tipping the doorman on Fifth Avenue,” he said. “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.”
The White House rejected the criticism, saying the gifts were legal and unrelated to the aides’ government work.
“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 read. “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.”
Former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and current law professor Barbara McQuaid also argued the payments violate ethics rules.
“Trump‘s cash gifts to government employees, violate ethics rules, which exist to promote loyalty to the United States over loyalty to one person,” the Obama appointee wrote on X. “He doesn’t get to break the law just because cash bonuses were ‘his longtime practice’ in the private sector.”
Don Fox, a former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, told the Post it is not clear that the payments violate the prohibition on supplementing federal salaries. He said that would depend in part on whether the money was intended to supplement the aides’ government compensation.
Fox said he still finds payments of that size troubling because they could leave employees feeling indebted to the person who gave them the money.
The Post found no other public examples of a U.S. president giving White House employees large cash payments and said government ethics experts were unaware of comparable payments.
If the payments were determined to violate the federal prohibition on supplementing government salaries, the law can apply to both the person making the payment and the employee receiving it. The statute of limitations is five years.
