Ethics law professor says gift amounts track staff compensation levels
President Donald Trump gave $157,000 in cash gifts to four White House aides, including $45,000 each to longtime aide Natalie Harp, communications advisor Margo Martin, and executive assistant Chamberlain Harris, according to financial disclosures released by his administration. Walt Nauta, Trump’s director of Oval Office Operations, received $22,000. The gifts are marked as “cash gift for the holidays” in the documents, which list 95 White House staff members; the other 91 received no gifts from the president.
Federal law prohibits federal employees from receiving outside compensation for their official duties, raising the question of whether the cash constitutes compensation. The White House described the gifts as personal in nature, unrelated to the staffers’ government work, and “entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards.” In a statement provided to the BBC, a White House official said 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 gifts at issue here have nothing to do with any of these individuals’ official government duties, and are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards,” the official added.
The White House did not respond to a separate BBC query on why the other 91 listed staff members did not receive gifts.
The four recipients are among those widely considered to be close to the president. Harp, 35, is one of Trump’s longest-serving and most loyal aides and is often tasked with typing out his Truth Social posts. Last month, she drew national attention after she was named as one of a small number of people who stayed with Trump as he secretly swapped planes leaving Turkey.
Nauta, a US Navy veteran, served as a White House military valet during Trump’s first term and later joined him as an assistant at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after he left office. In June 2023, he was indicted alongside Trump on charges that he mishandled national security documents; the case was ultimately dismissed.
Martin is well known for documenting Trump’s activities on social media. Harris, 26, was appointed in February to the US Commission of Fine Arts, which oversees the construction of the White House ballroom and other Trump-directed projects in Washington.
Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor and director of the Center for Professional Ethics at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, told the BBC that “it’s not an easy call” to determine whether the cash gifts were ethical. Robertson noted that the compensation amounts “seem to be standard” based on the recipients’ employee level. “That suggests that the decision on how much to give was made on the basis of somebody’s employment situation,” she said, “and not their state of friendship with the president.”
Robertson added that even if legal, the gifts — combined with recent controversies involving prediction markets and cryptocurrencies — could contribute to “a generalised perception of really rampant conflicts of interest.”
There are no other known instances of a sitting US president giving cash gifts to White House staff, though many presidents have given souvenirs or personal mementos. President Barack Obama, for example, gave former press secretary Robert Gibbs a framed necktie that he had once borrowed ahead of the 2004 Democratic National Convention.