'Deeply Troubling': Donald Trump Campaign Accused of 'Hiding Settlement Payments to Women'

Delgado, who served as a senior advisor on Trump's 2016 campaign, has claimed that she was unfairly and unlawfully sidelined after revealing that she was pregnant.

She alleged that during brief settlement negotiations in 2017, top Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz openly admitted that he wanted to cover up a potential payout, a violation of federal disclosure laws requiring campaigns to publicly report the identities of payment recipients.

Delgado recalled Kasowitz telling her that "Trump and the Campaign would need to keep this confidential" because Trump "is known for 'not settling.'" When her attorneys "expressed this would not be possible because disbursements by a Campaign are public record," she said, Kasowitz "dismissed the concerns easily," telling her that disclosure was "not a problem at all" and that "what we would do is the campaign pays me and then I cut a check to you guys."

"In other words, the payment would be routed through a middleman, to hide the fact that the Campaign had settled, from the public and the FEC," Delgado stated. "I thus have direct, personal experience with the Defendant-Campaign hiding settlement payments to women, routing them through a ‘middleman law firm,’ which to the public would only appear as payments 'for legal services.'"

Delgado further claimed to have "information and reason to believe" that Kasowitz funneled Trump campaign funds in illegally hidden settlements to multiple other women "who raised complaints of gender discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment."

Kasowitz's law firm reportedly received about $4.5 million from the Trump campaign over a two month period following the November 2021 election, and millions more in mysterious legal reimbursements were made to the campaign's finance compliance firm Red Curve Solutions.

"The allegations made in AJ Delgado’s declaration paint a deeply troubling picture of potentially illegal activity carried out by Donald Trump’s campaign," CREW president Noah Bookbinder told The Daily Beast in a statement. "The FEC must conduct an investigation to determine the validity of these claims and establish the degree to which any wrongdoing occurred."

Bookbinder added that the public has the right to know how political money is spent and that "schemes to hide that information undercut Americans’ faith in our political system. Donald Trump’s admission of using pass-through payments to hide their purpose and protect his political prospects makes it even more important that the FEC investigate. No candidate or campaign is above the law, not even Trump."

A Kasowitz Benson Torres spokesperson responded, "Ms. Delgado’s accusations that there were FEC violations or that the firm acted as a ‘middleman’ to ‘hid[e] settlement payments to women’ from the Campaign are pure fantasy and false."