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.
