5 Highlights of Donald's August FEC Filing

Today is FEC campaign finance report day -- the 20th of every month -- and after poring through it, here are five interesting tidbits:

1. Meredith McIver: Last month she appeared on the payroll with a $356.01 payroll expenditure line item, and just as suddenly as she appeared, in the August payroll she has disappeared. It's no wonder, of course, because the campaign had to pay her otherwise it would be a violation of federal election finance laws.
2. $till Behind: The campaign brought in $36.7M for August, but that's far behind the $52.3M Hillary's campaign brought in. This doesn't include the shared victory funds between the candidate and party, but even by that measure, Donald + GOP brought in just $90M while Hillary + Democrats brought in $143M. And that's really amusing when you consider the amount of time Donald spends on boasting about his personal wealth.
3. Accounting Trick?: After poring through three months of filings, I couldn't help notice that the campaign pays out, weekly, exactly $2,574.43 to Donald, his bodyguard, and Trump Tower Commercial LLC, each. At the same time, the campaign also credits Donald for a $2,574.43 in-kind donation. On the surface, it just looks silly that Donald would pay himself then credit the same amount back, but that his campaign would do this, seems to me that there must be some odd accounting trick going on here, particularly since he's paying his bodyguard the same amount at the same frequency. To add onto the oddity, the rest of the payroll is done bi-weekly. So why do that? Sure, campaigns pay a salary to the candidate, but why go weekly payroll for just three entities / people?
4. Expenses Jump: The campaign's expenditures jumped from $7.8M to $18.5M, half of which was spent on advertising. They're still spending a heck of a lot less than the Hillary campaign (she's spending roughly double that of Donald), and what it comes down to, is that Hillary's got a couple hundred workers involved in a massive ground game while Donald's got squat.
5. $till Charging More Rent: Like last month, Donald's campaign is still paying out the nose for rent at Trump's properties, now that Donald's raking in the dough from donors not named Donald J. Trump. I mean really, the more he sucks out of his own campaign, the less cash they have to do any campaigning or GOTV efforts, and that's fine by me!

BONUS:

Related to Donald's finances, WaPo's David Fahrenthold has been covering  the Trump Foundation 'charity' and its history of making improper use of the foundation's monies to benefit Donald. I'm sure the IRS will be interested, now that someone else has found the evidence of illegal donations (26 USC § 4941 (d)(1)(E)) and laid out the trail to follow. You can read the IRS' guidelines, and count all the ways Donald has been illegally operating his Foundation for years, including that potential in-kind donation he made to Pam Bondi for underpricing (failing to meet the fair market value) the rental costs of using Mar-a-Lago for her fundraiser.

The man-boy is most definitely in trouble with the law.