Trump Campaign Alleges UK Labour Party’s Election Interference Over Harris Campaign Support
Donald Trump campaign has accused Britain’s Labour Party of interfering in the US election through a tweet and filed a complaint to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The complaint revolves around rumors that Labour Party volunteers are preparing to go to America to campaign for Kamala Harris’s campaign while shedding light on the peculiarities of the regulation of the foreign influence in the USA elections.
Foreign Volunteer Controversy
The Trump campaign’s complaint in particular singles out a now-deleted LinkedIn post by the Labour Party’s head of operations, Sofia Patel, which listed plans for almost 100 current and former party employees to help in Harris’s campaign. Although foreign volunteers are allowed to participate in the U.S. election campaigns, they are not allowed to donate money, a law that saw the FEC penalize Bernie Sanders for accepting the support of the Australian Labour Party.
The volunteer effort has been defended by labour leader Keir Starmer stating that they are volunteering their own free time and going further afield, this is not a new trend for British political activists to support campaigns in the US. The practice has been that Labour members support Democrats while Conservatives support Republicans, which is a result of political divide in different continents.
Diplomatic Implications
But even if this rhetoric raises the temperature, including a Trump campaign press release entitled ‘The British are coming’ which accused the ‘far left Labour Party’ of inspiring ‘Kamala’s dangerously liberal policies,’ experts caution that the prospects are relatively low. Greg Swenson the chairman of Republicans Overseas UK said that although Trump takes personal vendettas very seriously, the event is unlikely to harm the relations between UK and USA should Trump become the President.
In the last few months senior Labour advisers have been reporting back from discussions with Democratic campaigners and pollsters, including learning about their more recent successes in the former industrial areas of Britain. This meeting took place after Labour’s overwhelming success in the July British election and these meetings have turned into the bigger issue of campaign contacts.
