Donald Trump will have to forgo the royalties on the $55,055 he spent at Barnes & Noble buying his own book with donor money.
According to the FEC, Trump’s camp spent this campaign money and paid retail for numerous copies of his title, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again on May 10. The Daily Beast interviewed Paul Ryan, of the nonpartisan nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, who said he would have to forgo royalties for the transaction to be legal.
“It’s fine for a candidate’s book to be purchased by his committee, but it’s impermissible to receive royalties from the publisher,” Ryan told The Daily Beast. “That amounts to an illegal conversion of campaign funds to personal use. There’s a well established precedent from the FEC that funds from the campaign account can’t end up in your own pocket.”