EXCLUSIVE — A coalition of watchdog groups is asking former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris to disclose their top “bundler” fundraisers, according to letters sent Thursday to the Harris and Trump campaigns.
The 13 watchdogs said in the letters to Harris and Trump that releasing information on their bundlers, who are typically wealthy people who solicit donations for candidates, is important so voters can have better transparency about who may be influencing the 2024 elections. Candidates are not required under federal law to report their bundlers unless they are federal lobbyists, but campaigns have long done so willingly.
“Government accountability depends on transparency in our campaign finance system, and that includes transparency about presidential campaign bundlers,” the watchdogs wrote in the letters, which were signed by Issue One, Campaign Legal Center, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Common Cause, OpenSecrets, National Legal and Policy Center, Public Citizen, and other groups.
“This is why we call on you today to implement a system to regularly and meaningfully release information about your campaign bundlers before Election Day,” they said. “Ideally, your campaign would release information about your bundlers in tandem with all upcoming campaign finance reporting deadlines with the Federal Election Commission.”
In their letter to Harris, the transparency groups cited how previous candidate Joe Biden released information about his bundlers in 2020. Last year, an NBC News report indicated the then-Biden-Harris reelection ticket had at least four tiers of bundlers receiving special perks and access on the campaign trail as they fundraised for the Democrats.
“It has long been a bipartisan tradition for candidates to voluntarily release information about their elite campaign fundraisers, with Democrats and Republicans alike embracing the practice, including President Joe Biden, former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Senator John McCain, and you during the 2020 presidential election,” the letter to Harris noted.
The watchdog coalition also includes Business for America, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters of the United States, Michigan Campaign Finance Network, Project on Government Oversight, and RepresentUs. The letter to Trump cited multiple reports that the watchdogs said showed the former president has at least seven tiers of bundlers, including those raising at least $1 million.
In the telling of Michael Beckel, the research director for Issue One, “The public has the right to know who is trying to curry favor, access, and influence with the next president by raising significant sums of campaign cash.”
“It’s concerning to see the nominees of both major parties backsliding on this simple transparency measure that helps bolster trust in government,” Beckel, a former journalist at the Center for Public Integrity and Center for Responsive Politics, told the Washington Examiner.
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“Over the past 25 years, both Democrats and Republican presidential candidates have understood the value of voluntarily sharing information with the public about their campaign bundlers,” Beckel said. “Disclosing information about campaign bundlers is a good-government guardrail that should not be abandoned.”
The Harris and Trump campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.
