STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President Trump gave three White House aides $45,000 each, amounting to almost a third of their salaries. These payments were labeled cash gifts for holidays, according to the administration's financial disclosures released last week. Cat Zakrzewski is a White House correspondent for The Washington Post, and she broke the story along with her colleague, Aaron Schaffer. She's on the line. Good morning.
CAT ZAKRZEWSKI: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: Who's getting the money?
ZAKRZEWSKI: So these are three longtime young loyal White House aides. Natalie Harp, who is his executive assistant and rarely leaves his side, was one of the women who received a payment. Margo Martin, who has worked for Trump on social media and generally is closer to the president than even Secret Service agents filming his every move received a payment. And then Chamberlain Harris, who has been a longtime receptionist for him and now serves on the Fine Arts Commission, which is overseeing renovations related to his White House ballroom project.
INSKEEP: OK, so in addition to Natalie Harp, Chamberlain Harris, Margo Martin, there's a fourth employee who got $20,000. Who's that?
ZAKRZEWSKI: That's Walt Nauta. He's a longtime aide of Donald Trump who worked with him in the first term and in between his presidencies at Mar-a-Lago. You might recognize his name from the classified documents case.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
ZAKRZEWSKI: And he received $20,000 on top of the $175,000 he already makes from the White House.
INSKEEP: OK, so these are people very close to the president. They get a $45,000 bonus. Now, in fairness, people sometimes get a holiday bonus. What is unusual about this, if anything?
ZAKRZEWSKI: So what ethics experts tell me is highly unusual about this is the amount of money here. This is a check that amounts to one-third of these workers' salaries. And typically, you don't see federal workers get bonuses of this nature for the holidays paid out of their superior's pocket directly. And ethics experts tell me it creates concerns that their incomes could be supplemented, which is against federal rules about federal workers getting money from outside sources.
INSKEEP: Did the president personally pay them?
ZAKRZEWSKI: According to the filings, the money came directly from him. It's not clear where Trump sourced the money from himself.
INSKEEP: That is on my mind because I don't feel I'm even being pejorative here. I'm being descriptive. The president doesn't pay for things. He brags openly about refusing to pay for things, not paying for things, getting other people to pay for things. And so that does raise the question, did he reach out to someone else to get the money to give them?
ZAKRZEWSKI: It's a question that we can't answer directly from the information we have right now. The payment says from Donald J. Trump. But we'll obviously continue reporting to see if we can answer where the funds came from originally.
INSKEEP: Just briefly, can you explain to me what the ethical issue would be here in making such a large payment to federal employees?
ZAKRZEWSKI: So ethics experts raised the issue that there are rules in place to ensure that outside sources are not giving federal workers extra income to make it easier for them to work in government. So there's a concern there that this is such a large sum of money that it could violate those rules.
INSKEEP: Oh, I think you're telling me, they're paid by me and you as taxpayers. They're supposed to be working for us and not for some other, private source that gives them money.
ZAKRZEWSKI: Ethics experts worry and said it was troublesome that these payments could make them more beholden to the president than the taxpayers.
INSKEEP: Cat Zakrzewski is a White House correspondent for The Washington Post. Thanks so much.
ZAKRZEWSKI: Thanks so much.
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