House Democrats on Monday pushed ahead with their effort to have President Donald Trump impeached, convicted in the Senate and disqualified from ever holding federal office again over last week’s siege on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
But even in the unlikely event that two-thirds of senators would agree to convict Trump, there’s little to stop him from continuing to ask his supporters for money in the months and years ahead, campaign finance experts say.
Disqualification “has no bearing on the political committee money he already has raised, and it would have no bearing on his ability to continue to raise money into a political committee,” said Paul S. Ryan, a top lawyer with the watchdog group Common Cause.
“He has a lot of options, and he has the infrastructure in place,” added Larry Noble, a CNN contributor and former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission.
In addition to his presidential campaign committee, Trump already has established a post-presidency vehicle — the Save America political action committee — that can help underwrite his expenses, fund travel and staff and support like-minded candidates.
And experts say Trump, as a non-candidate, would be free to launch other fundraising arms with even fewer legal guardrails on his activity than his current committees. Running a super PAC, for instance, would give Trump the option to spend unlimited amounts of money and take contributions of any size, including an in-kind donation of his campaign’s data about its donors.
Although Twitter’s decision Friday night to permanently ban Trump from its platform immediately cut the President off from his 88.7 million followers, Trump and his campaign committee still have “an enormously valuable asset in their email list,” Ryan said.
The President has inundated his supporters with appeals for cash — helping to raise more than $ 200 million between the election and early December alone as he falsely argued that the election against him was rigged. There was no evidence of widespread fraud.
By CNN’s count, the Trump campaign had sent 606 fundraising emails between 11 p.m. election night and Wednesday afternoon, shortly before the Capitol was breached.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
But Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller has indicated the President intends to remain a fundraising force, telling The Washington Post over the weekend that Trump still is “the biggest name in Republican politics” and plans deploy millions of dollars to help GOP congressional candidates in the 2022 midterm elections.
As the outrage over the insurrection at the Capitol mounted, the financial technology company Stripe joined the growing number of companies seeking to distance themselves from the President or his Republican allies on Capitol Hill who contested Trump’s election defeat. The company decided to halt payment processing from Trump’s campaign website, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. The Wall Street Journal first reported the company’s decision.
Stripe, however, is just one payment company active in politics, leaving Trump’s political operation with other options — at least for now.
