Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign hired a marketing firm run by Judge Juan Merchan’s adult daughter, according to an ethics complaint that accuses the New York state supreme court justice of having a conflict of interest that should disqualify him from presiding over the hush-money case against former president Donald Trump.
The complaint, filed on Friday by Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), reveals that the Harris campaign paid $468 to Loren Merchan’s political consulting firm Authentic Campaigns on July 30, nine days after Harris replaced President Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket.
“This indicates that one of the very first things that Harris did upon taking over the Biden campaign infrastructure is to hire this firm, Authentic,” Stefanik wrote.
The House Republican is calling on the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct to launch a “fresh inquiry” into Judge Merchan’s conflict of interest due to his daughter’s work for the Harris campaign.
Any judge whose “relative up to and including the sixth degree has a financial interest in the outcome” of a particular case must recuse himself from that court case, according to New York’s code of judicial conduct. Merchan’s daughter is considered a relative in the first degree, Stefanik noted.
The Harris campaign submitted the Federal Election Commission filing showing the $468 transaction on August 20, nearly a month after Harris started running for president. Stefanik said that “no one in the public, including the Commission, could have known of the relationship” between the Harris campaign and Authentic.
The Biden campaign did not hire Authentic, whose clients are Democratic politicians, for its web-hosting services prior to dropping out of the race. Instead, it used Amazon Web Services.
“This is merely the beginning of a new contract with a new campaign, regardless of the amount reimbursed,” Stefanik wrote. “Sure, there’s an immediate benefit, but this is a play at a potential larger benefit for Authentic and Merchan down the road.”
The judicial ethics complaint was filed shortly before Merchan postponed Trump’s hush-money sentencing from September 18 to November 26, three weeks after the general election. This marks the second time that Trump’s sentencing was pushed back; the former president was originally scheduled to be sentenced in July ahead of the Republican National Convention.
In May, Stefanik filed a previous judicial ethics complaint, which was later rejected, against Merchan with the New York commission.
Loren Merchan worked for Harris’s failed 2020 presidential campaign while serving as vice president at Authentic Campaigns, where she would later become president. In 2020, her father donated $15 to the Biden-Harris presidential campaign in 2020 and two $10 contributions to progressive organizations.
Like Stefanik, House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) has been looking into Loren Merchan’s work for Harris and Democrats. Jordan subpoenaed Authentic last week to obtain records on Loren Merchan’s ties to Harris and the Democratic Party, and determine whether Judge Merchan should recuse himself from the case due to ethical issues.