Former President Trump’s campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Tuesday, accusing President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of violating campaign finance laws by transferring his $91 million in fundraising cash to her new campaign. 

Biden bowed out of the presidential race on Sunday following weeks of calls for him to leave following a shaky debate performance. 

The president endorsed the vice president to run for the Democratic ticket in his place and transferred his millions of dollars in campaign cash over to her. 

The Trump campaign argued in the complaint, first reported by The New York Times and obtained by Fox News Digital, that Harris is “seeking to perpetrate a $91.5 million dollar heist of Joe Biden’s leftover campaign cash.”

MARGIN-OF-ERROR RACE BETWEEN HARRIS, TRUMP IN NEW POLL CONDUCTED AFTER BIDEN DROPPED

David Warrington, who serves as general counsel for the Trump campaign, called the act “a brazen money grab that would constitute the single largest excessive contribution and biggest violation in the history of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, as amended.”

“Kamala Harris is in the process of committing the largest campaign finance violation in American history and she is using the Commission’s own forms to do it,” the filing concluded. “The Commission must not and cannot sit idly by while one candidate takes nearly one hundred million dollars from the authorized committee of another, in violation of the Act and the will of the donors who gave the money in the first place.”

Included in the complaint are Biden, Harris, “Biden for President (aka Harris for President) and Keana Spencer, as treasurer, for flagrantly violating the Act by making and receiving an excessive contribution of nearly one hundred million dollars, and for filing fraudulent forms with the Commission purporting to repurpose one candidate’s principal campaign committee for the use of another candidate.”

President Biden endorsed Vice President Harris to run for the Democratic ticket in his place and transferred his millions of dollars in campaign cash over to her.  (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images))

WHAT’S NEXT FOR HARRIS NOW THAT SHE’S SEEMINGLY LOCKED UP THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION?

The complaint argues that if “Kamala Harris were a candidate for something in 2024, federal law requires her to have filed a Statement of Candidacy and for her name to have appeared in the name of her authorized committee. But Kamala Harris’s name does not appear in the name of her purported authorized committee, ‘Biden for President,’ and, until Sunday, no Statement of Candidacy existed for her. Then Sunday, rather than filing her own Statement of Candidacy, she merely altered Joe Biden’s to replace his name with hers. There is no mechanism under the Act for one individual to end another’s federal candidacy by simply amending the other’s Form 2. Moreover, in that purported amended Form 2 Harris designated ‘Biden for President’ as her principal campaign committee and then renamed it. Altering a document submitted to a federal agency is a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1519.3.” 

The Harris campaign told Fox News Digital that the complaint was “baseless.”

David Warrington, who serves as general counsel for the Trump campaign, called the act “a brazen money grab that would constitute the single largest excessive contribution and biggest violation in the history of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, as amended.” (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“Team Harris will continue to build on our more than 250 coordinated offices and more than 1,300 coordinated staffers across the battleground states – just like we built on the $240 million cash on hand that we had at launch this week, raising $100 million in our first 36 hours and signing up 58,000 volunteers,” the statement read.

“Republicans may be jealous that Democrats are energized to defeat Donald Trump and his MAGA allies, but baseless legal claims – like the ones they’ve made for years to try to suppress votes and steal elections – will only distract them while we sign up volunteers, talk to voters, and win this election.”

Harris’ team broke a record with their more than $100 million fundraising haul since Biden dropped out on Sunday and Harris launched her candidacy. Biden had seen much of his fundraising dry up following his difficult debate on June 27. 

In her first speech since Biden dropped out, Harris spoke to Biden campaign staffers on Monday, assuring them she would need the team to stay on to run her campaign with the election little more than 100 days away on Nov. 5. 

Vice President Kamala Harris made a grand entrance Monday during her first official visit to her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., with Freedom” by Beyoncé blasting as her soundtrack.

Beyoncé gave the former senator from California permission to use her song throughout the presidential campaign, which manifested after President Biden dropped out of the 2024 campaign Sunday and endorsed Harris. A spokesperson for Beyoncé told CNN that Harris’ team had received “quick approval” just hours before she walked out to the song.

Although Beyoncé hasn’t officially endorsed Harris, who dropped out of the 2020 presidential race in 2019, 10 months before election day, that the “Texas Hold Em” singer is allowing her song to be used hints at some support for the Democratic hopeful.

On the other hand, Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, shared her support for Harris in a Sunday post on Instagram. “New, Youthful, Sharp, energy !!!! You asked for it and our President Biden did what was best for the country ! Putting personal Ego, power and fame aside . That is the definition of a great leader,” Knowles said. “Thank you, President Biden, for your service and your leadership . Go Vice President Kamala Harris for President. Let’s Go.”

The singer definitely leans Democrat: Right before election day in 2020, Beyoncé posted a photo on Instagram showing herself in a Balmain hat with an “I voted” sticker and a Biden-Harris mask. “Come thru, Texas! #VOTE,” she wrote in the caption.

In 2013, she famously sang the national anthem at then-President Obama’s inauguration, and she and husband Jay-Z headlined a pre-election concert in 2016 for then-candidate Hillary Clinton in Cleveland. Her backup dancers wore blue pantsuits with shirts that read, “I’m with her.”

“There was a time when a woman’s opinion did not matter. If you were Black, white, Mexican, Asian, Muslim, educated, poor or rich … if you were a woman, it did not matter,” Beyoncé told the Cleveland crowd. “I want my daughter to grow up seeing a woman lead our country and knowing that her possibilities are limitless … And that’s why I am with her.”

“Freedom,” featuring Kendrick Lamar, first appeared on Beyoncé’s sixth studio album, “Lemonade,” which was released in April 2016. The Times’ music critic Mikael Wood said in his review of the album, “The highly personal ‘Lemonade’ upends expectations in another way, which is the turn it seems to take from [the track] ‘Formation,’ a statement of radical Black positivity that suggested Beyoncé was readying an explicitly political album.”

The duo performed the song together onstage at the 2016 BET Awards with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech playing over the track as the song opened.

President Biden ended his re-election campaign on Sunday after a post-debate slump in national and swing-state polls. In less than four weeks, his position had deteriorated in three Rust Belt states crucial to his re-election, as former President Donald J. Trump’s once narrow polling leads grew wider.

Mr. Biden fell again in the polls after a gunman’s attempted assassination of Mr. Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13. The president lost support in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as other swing states where he had already been trailing by four to five points.

Mr. Biden’s path to the presidency narrowed as his standing in the swing-state polls dropped, most likely a factor in his decision to drop out of the race. Multiple Democratic officials publicly shared their concerns about recent polling trends in urging him to step aside.

Polls and the Electoral College

Might the polls have been wrong, or have underestimated support for Mr. Biden? It’s possible, but his deficit was nearing the edges of the biggest polling misses in recent elections. Assuming the polls did not change before Election Day, he would have needed the polling margins in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan to miss by at least five points in his favor.

The Times has published an update to its polling averages that shows Mr. Trump with a narrow national lead over Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the most likely Democratic nominee. Most of the polls were conducted before she was a candidate, and there are currently few or no polls of the new matchup at the state level. It may take at least a week or two to gain a broader understanding of how Ms. Harris’s entry will affect the race.