Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, argues that the $45,000 cash gifts President Donald Trump gave three of his closest aides were not gifts at all but an illegal supplement to their federal salaries — a reading the White House rejects. In remarks published on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, Painter told Newsweek the payments break federal law and could carry consequences for the president himself: “President Trump could get himself impeached for it.”
That is one lawyer’s opinion, not a court ruling and not a proceeding. No impeachment resolution has been filed, no congressional inquiry has been opened and the Justice Department has taken no action. Legal experts disagree publicly over whether the money runs afoul of the statute Painter cites, and no authoritative ruling has been issued.
What the Disclosures Show
Natalie Harp, executive assistant to the president, reported a “cash gift for the holidays” of $45,000 from Trump. Communications adviser Margo Martin and Chamberlain Harris, deputy director of Oval Office operations, each reported a $45,000 gift as well, according to financial disclosure statements. Walt Nauta, director of Oval Office operations, disclosed a separate $20,000 gift, bringing the combined total for the four aides to $155,000.
The size of the payments drew attention. Harp, Martin and Harris each earn about $150,000 a year, so $45,000 equals roughly 30 percent of an annual salary. Nauta is paid $175,000, making his $20,000 gift closer to 11 percent of his pay.
The administration published the four forms, which cover 2025, in September 2026. Public financial disclosure filers must report gifts totaling more than $480 from any single source during the reporting period, subject to exclusions. According to those same filings, the aides had earlier drawn paychecks from his transition operation, from Save America or from Donald J. Trump for President 2024, Inc.
All three women worked for Trump long before the current administration. Harp, 35, joined his political operation in 2022 and later moved into the White House; during the 2024 campaign she became known as “the human printer” for 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 is a 1962 federal law, 18 U.S.C. Section 209, titled “Salary of Government officials and employees payable only by United States.” It generally bars executive branch employees from accepting compensation, or a supplement to their salary, from anyone other than the federal government for their work as government employees.
It does not forbid every financial benefit: employees may keep taking part in bona fide retirement, insurance and other benefit programs run by former employers, and the law carves out several specific government programs and circumstances. The usual question in a Section 209 dispute is whether the money was compensation for government service or was provided for some other reason.
Painter argues that a former boss who hands a longtime employee a large sum after that employee enters government is paying salary, not giving a present. “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.” Both the employee and the person who makes the payments could be criminally charged under the statute, he said, and a five-year statute of limitations would let a future Justice Department revisit the payments even if the current one does not.
Any penalty remains hypothetical, and nobody has been charged. Under federal law, violators face fines, civil penalties and a prison term that can run as long as a year — stretching to five years when the violation is willful — and the Justice Department may ask a court to order a halt to conduct that breaches the statute. A 1990 Supreme Court ruling held that Section 209 did not reach certain payments made before the recipients became government employees.
The White House Pushes Back
The White House said in a statement: “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 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, told CNN 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, not a prosecution. The House of Representatives impeaches by simple majority; 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.
Trump has been through it before: the House impeached him in 2019 and again in 2021, during his first term, and the Senate acquitted him both times.
Painter teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, and he was chief White House ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007. 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.