Wild claims have emerged that Donald Trump broke the law when he took a $100 bill out of his wallet to help pay for a Pennsylvania woman’s grocery shopping.
As employees at the Sprankles grocery store in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, searched the shopper, Trump pulled out his wallet, pulled out a new $100 bill and handed it to cashiers to contribute to the total bill.
“Here,” Trump said of his grocery bill
“It’s going to go down a little bit. It just went down $100.”
“We’ll do it for you in the White House, okay?” he said, asking for her vote.
But instead of praising the act of goodwill, many have taken to social media to claim that what Trump did was illegal because he is a presidential candidate.
Donald Trump pulled $100 in cash from his wallet and handed it to a mother of three who was checking out at a local grocery chain in western Pennsylvania on Monday.
“It is illegal for a presidential candidate, or any candidate, to hand out cash to voters in the United States,” one X user said.
Offering money or any form of valuable consideration in exchange for a vote is considered bribery and violates federal election laws.
‘The Federal Election Campaign Act and related laws prohibit this type of conduct to ensure that elections are free and fair.’
‘Both the person offering the bribe and the person receiving it could face legal consequences.
But former Federal Election Commission chief Hans von Spakovsky called the claims “absurd at first glance.”
“Trump was obviously making what he considered a charitable donation and that in no way implicates any federal law governing elections,” he told Dailymail.com.
Spakovsky now manages the Election Law Reform Initiative at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
And another legal expert says “the payment appears perfectly legal” from his perspective.
Spakovsky said the “considered” response to “his money problems” did not violate election or campaign finance laws.
“The hype on social media about this issue is ridiculous,” he concluded.
A mother of three was shopping with her three children when Trump arrived at the store between a roundtable with farmers and a rally, all in towns neighboring Pittsburgh.
Trump visited a local supermarket chain in western Pennsylvania on Monday, where he helped pay for a woman’s grocery purchases out of his own pocket.
But there is debate over whether Trump’s comment was intended to ask for her vote or whether he even discussed her vote.
Rather, some say the former president was repeating his promise to lower food prices.
And election law expert Mike Dimino, a law professor at Widener University’s Commonwealth School of Law, appears to draw the same conclusion from the interaction.
“It is illegal to pay someone to vote, to abstain from voting or to vote for a specific candidate. However, it is not illegal to give money to other people per se,” he told DailyMail.com.
“If that were the case,” he explained, “candidates would not be able to make donations to charities or give money to the homeless, or even tip a waiter or a hairdresser. The question is whether the payment was made in exchange for a vote or was purely gratuitous.”
“Everything I’ve seen about the incident seems to indicate that there was no quid pro quo,” Dimino concluded.
‘Trump surely wanted the public relations benefit of helping a shopper deal with inflated food prices, and suggested he could do more to lower prices if elected, but he asked the woman for nothing in return for the $100.’