Trump accused of ‘stealing’ from Herschel Walker campaign with deceptive fundraising emails

Fundraising blitz kicks off ahead of the 6 December runoff

Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker’s campaign has accused Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, of “deceptive” fundraising.

Mr Walker is set to face Senator Raphael Warnock in a runoff in Georgia on 6 December after neither man won a majority of the vote during last week’s election.

But Scott Paradise, Mr Walker’s campaign manager, called out Republicans who advertised fundraising for Mr Walker and called on them to share more of the money, NBC News reported.

“We need everyone focused on winning the Georgia Senate race, and deceptive fundraising tactics by teams that just won their races are siphoning money away from Georgia,” he said. “The companies and consultants raising money off this need to cut it out.”

Inside Elections’ Jacob Rubashkin flagged that fundraising emails from the former president said “Contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to the Official Georgia Runoff Fundraising Goal and increase your impact by 1200%.”

If donors don’t see a link that says “click here for details or to edit allocation,” the email contributions automatically default to giving Mr Trump’s Save America 90 per cent and Mr Walker’s campaign only 10 per cent.

Online, many observers quickly accused the GOP of “stealing” donations from Mr Walker’s campaign.

After the news broke, Mr Trump’s committee changed the split to go half to Mr Walker and half to Mmr Trump. The two have known each other going back to when Mr Walker played for the New Jersey Generals, the United States Football League team that Mr Trump owned.

In addition, the North Carolina Republican Party, JD Vance’s campaign and Ted Budd defaulted to the 90-10 ratio as well. North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley said Mr Walker’s campaign contacted him about it.

“Anything that we raise is going to be put into deployments down into Georgia. We’ll definitely be sending teams,” Mr Whatley said.

The runoff in Georgia comes after Democrats secured 50 Senate seats, enough to give them a majority with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking ties. But if they win one more seat, they will have much more power. Meanwhile, Republicans hope to bring Democrats to a draw after they failed to flip seats in Arizona, New Hampshire or Nevada.