A Trump employee who monitored security cameras at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate abruptly retracted his earlier grand jury testimony and implicated Trump and others in obstruction of justice just after switching from an attorney paid for by a Trump political action committee to a lawyer from the federal defender’s office in Washington, prosecutors said in a court filing Tuesday.
Candidates actually can and do control PACs… up to a certain point. For example, the entire reason that Mike Huckabee keeps running for offices he knows he will never get past the very, very early primary stage, is because he can get his PAC funded and he can enrich himself and his family. Did you know that Mike Huckabee pays his children six figures a year for “roles” they hold in his PAC? That includes now-governor (barf) Sarah Huckabee-Sanders.
Trump took it to the extreme, though. But it is completely normal and legal. It is why PACs were always a bullshit proposition. It is also why people hold off so long on officially declaring candidacy and actually filing the paperwork until the deadline because that starts the clock as to when they can no longer directly personally control PACs and directly profit off of them.