U.S. News & World Report: Is Trump's Campaign Breaking the Law by Paying Money to Trump's Businesses?
"I've never seen it before on this level," says Larry Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, a good-government watchdog group. Trump using his own businesses and staff for his own presidential campaign, Noble says, "raises the appearance of benefiting from your company, and co-mingling funds" with a campaign for the nation's highest office.
Noble hastened to add that Trump isn't necessarily doing anything illegal – the law allows candidates to use their businesses to help their campaigns as long as they're disciplined about it.
But the descriptions of his expenditures are vague and the money is harder to track, Noble says. Coupled with lax FEC enforcement and privacy rules – the commission cannot legally disclose whether a campaign is under investigation – the system "is ripe for abuse," he says.
"It's not clear what [the Trump campaign] is doing is legal, it's not clear what they're doing is not legal," Noble says. "That's because it's not entirely clear what they're doing."