WASHINGTON — Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., accused the Trump administration on Monday of running a “massive pay-to-play scheme” around the White House ballroom. He was responding to a newspaper investigation, published four days earlier, that obtained an internal list of the project’s major donors.
Schiff posted his reaction on X at 10:28 a.m. on Oct. 19. His full post read:
“The Trump administration is running a massive pay-to-play scheme with the President’s golden ballroom. Now you can see who is paying the freight and the pardons, contracts, mergers and more they want in return.
The corruption is costing you billions.”
The article he was responding to is a Washington Post investigation published Oct. 15 under the headline “Secret documents reveal donors behind $330 million for Trump’s ballroom.” It is the only newspaper named in this report.
The investigation is based on an internal spreadsheet used to track contributions. The spreadsheet records 67 donations above $10,000 as of late September and shows $333 million from private donors. Additional internal records indicate that at least $77 million came from donors who asked to remain anonymous.
Nvidia, Apple, the Adelson family and Dish Network co-founder Charles Ergen each committed $25 million, the top contribution amount on the list. Trump does not appear on the list. He said last year that the project was “paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine.”
The reporting says it does not establish a connection between the donation commitments and favorable actions by the administration. It does say the vast majority of the money came from companies and wealthy individuals with interests before the federal government. Firms or executives with federal contracts during Trump’s second term accounted for about half of the total.
What the Records Show About Individual Donors
One of the earliest commitments, dated Sept. 23, 2025, came from the daughter of international banker Julio Herrera Velutini. The Justice Department indicted him in 2022 on bribery charges, and in August 2025 the charges were reduced to a misdemeanor under a plea agreement. His daughter committed $2.5 million to the ballroom the following month and paid a first installment of $835,000 on Oct. 14, 2025. Trump pardoned Herrera Velutini in January. Neither he nor his daughter responded to requests for comment.
The records also show Ergen committed $12.5 million in December and another $12.5 million in February, with a request that the source remain anonymous. Months earlier, the Federal Communications Commission had opened an investigation into his company, EchoStar, and then dropped it. In May, the FCC and the Justice Department approved EchoStar’s sale of licenses to AT&T. Ergen and EchoStar declined to comment.
A Rocket Companies subsidiary committed $10 million three weeks after the Federal Housing Finance Agency approved the company’s acquisition of Mr. Cooper on Aug. 26, 2025. A Rocket spokesperson said the approvals and the donation were not connected.
Salesforce and its CEO, Marc Benioff, are listed with separate $1 million commitments. In between, the Army awarded Salesforce a contract worth up to $5.6 billion through 2035. A Pentagon official said political connections “play absolutely no role” in funding decisions, and an Army spokesperson said contracts are awarded in strict compliance with federal law. Salesforce and Benioff did not respond to requests for comment.
The Response
White House spokesman Davis Ingle declined to discuss individual donations. He called the donors a wide array of American companies and generous individuals and said the administration would pursue those responsible for the leak. The Trust for the National Mall, the nonprofit that collects the funds, said it is not uncommon for philanthropic donors to request anonymity and that it is committed to honoring those requests.
Schiff’s Record on the Ballroom
Schiff’s Monday post continues a campaign he has led for roughly a year. In late October 2025, he led Senate Democrats, including Sens. Alex Padilla, Richard Blumenthal, Chris Van Hollen, Tammy Duckworth, Jon Ossoff and Bernie Sanders, in a letter to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. The letter said the donor list raised “influence peddling and other forms of corruption.” It asked for a full accounting of the donations and for identification of donors with federal contracts, pending regulatory approvals or litigation. Schiff also sent his request to the Government Accountability Office.
In November 2025, Schiff joined Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren in writing to the project’s lead fundraiser and to lobbyists working on the donations. The senators said soliciting hundreds of millions of dollars for a ballroom bearing the president’s name “raises questions that Americans deserve to have answered.” They asked what donors were told they would receive in exchange for contributions and what compensation the fundraisers expected.
On July 23, 2026, Schiff delivered a speech titled “The Cost of Corruption: Top 10 Ways Trump Has Profited off the Presidency,” which addressed what the ballroom donations could otherwise have paid for. He has also joined Democrats in backing legislation that would limit how the federal government can use private donations for construction projects.
The fundraising total falls short of the $400 million Trump has said he intends to raise. The cost of the new East Wing, which includes the ballroom, was projected in March to reach $600 million, and the White House has used taxpayer dollars to cover part of the construction.