President Donald Trump has requested an “important investigation” in several celebrity endorsers received by former vice president Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential campaign, which suggests without evidence that some of the celebrities were illegally paid by their backs.
Some of the celebrities have denied publicly denying that they have paid a rate, and experts say that there is no festing law that prohibits the payments of the campaign for the guarantees.
Among the celebrities that the president suggests that they were illegally paid for their guarantees are Oprah Winfrey, Bruce Springsteen and Beyonce, each of which appeared in the events of the Harris campaign last year.
“The candidates are not allowed to pay for support, which is what Kamala did, under the appearance of paying entertainment,” Trump wrote in a couple of publications on social networks on Monday.
The Harris campaign paid the production companies founded by Winfrey, Springsteen and Beyonce for the services provided during and after the 2024 elections, but the mother of Winfrey and Beyonce, who directs their production company, both said that the payments were due to production costs associated with the events in which they participated.
Campaign law experts told ABC News that the Federal Elections Commission has no regulations against federal campaigns that pay celebrities or influencers for support, nor would illegal contributions be considered as Trump suggested, provided that these payments are properly revealed. The Federal Commerce Commission supervises the obligations for dissemination for the paid support, experts said.
The campaign financing revelations show that Harris’s campaign paid the Winfrey company, Harpo Productions, a total of $ 1 million for “event production” on October 15, 2024, approximately one month after Winfrey interviewed Harris in a “Unite for America” campaign event in Detroit in September.
The vice president and democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris joins the American television producer Oprah Winfrey in a live broadcast concentration of ‘Unite for America’ in Farmington Hills, Michigan, on September 19, 2024.
Saul Loeb/AFP through Getty Images
“I did not take any personal fee. However, the people who worked on that production had to pay and were. End of history,” Winfrey said in a video of social networks in response to Trump’s accusation.
Harris’s campaign paid Beyonce’s Company, Parkwood Production Media LLC, $ 165,000 on November 19, 2024, weeks after Beyonce took the stage in a Harris campaign demonstration in Houston and publicly supported Harris, according to the campaign records.
Beyonce’s mother, Tina Knowles, in a video of social networks, said that the accusation that her daughter was paid for her support is a “lie”, and added that Beyonce also paid the flights for her and her team to and from the event.
The Harris campaign paid the Springsteen production company, Thrill Hill Productions, Inc., approximately $ 75,000 for “Travel and Events and Events” on November 19, 2024, approximately one month after acting in a Harris campaign demonstration in Georgia, according to records. Springsteen has not publicly approached the payment of the campaign to your company.
Last year, as unfounded statements about Harris’s campaign payments for the support of celebrities, said Senior campaign advisor Adrienne Elrod Deadline“We do not pay. We have never paid any artist and interpreter. We have never paid a rate to that person.”
By pointing out that the Fec rules require that the campaigns pay a fair market value for the auxiliary costs of celebrating events, Elrod told Deadline that the campaign has paid “for any auxiliary cost for that performance” and that “there are laws that must be followed that we have followed religiously in this campaign.”
Among the celebrities that appeared and acted in Trump’s campaign events over the years, ABC News has not found records of the Trump campaign or the other Trump entities that pay them or their companies.
Country Lee Greenwood singer, whose song “God Bless The USA” frequently appears in Trump Rallies and who has performed at Trump’s campaign events, declared on social networks in November that he had not been compensated in “No form” by Trump’s campaign or Trump’s organization for his appearances in the campaign, saying that he is “happy to have been for” Trump. “
