Subject: Trump hammering out party fundraising agreement
From: POLITICO <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 May 2016 15:28:42 -0600

Trump hammering out party fundraising agreement
By Kenneth P. Vogel, Eli Stokols and Alex Isenstadt
05/09/2016 05:26 PM EDT

Donald Trump's campaign is hashing out the details of an agreement with Republican Party leaders that could allow the presumptive GOP presidential nominee to raise six-figure checks for his presidential campaign, multiple sources with direct knowledge of the negotiations tell POLITICO.

The fundraising agreement was among the subjects discussed at a Monday meeting at the Republican National Committee's Washington offices between top RNC officials, including chairman Reince Priebus, and senior Trump aides, including campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, senior adviser Paul Manafort and political director Rick Wiley, according to the sources.

The talks represent the first formal steps towards a merger between the official apparatus of the Republican Party and a candidate who many party leaders scorned until recently, and about whom there remains deep leeriness in some Republican quarters. 

Since Trump essentially clinched the GOP nomination with a win in last week's Indiana primary, his staff has moved quickly to put their stamp on the party's general election planning process. Wiley has paid several visits to the party's headquarters on Capitol Hill to assess its efforts, according to the sources. The campaign also has been discussing convention-related issues with the RNC, including credentials and rules, the sources said.

And deputy campaign manager Michael Glassner this week is set to lead a delegation to the convention site, Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena, to receive a briefing from RNC officials involved in planning for the July event, as POLITICO first reported last week.

Fundraising was not a major focus of Monday's meetings, according to RNC senior strategist Sean Spicer. "It was 3 &frac12; hours on briefings from all the RNC divisions regarding the capabilities and resources that we have been compiling to win in November," said Spicer, who attended the meeting.

The conversations are also partly an effort to lay the groundwork for a Thursday meeting in Washington between Trump, Priebus and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who announced last Thursday that he is withholding his endorsement until Trump outlines a stronger commitment to conservative principles.

The perception among Trump's inner circle is that Ryan is attempting to leverage his position as chairman of the Cleveland convention into securing a deal that protects the party's control over vendor contracts and how the money raised jointly by the party and Trump's campaign is spent.

"Trump is a tough negotiator, understands the history of what he's entitled to here," another Trump confidant said. "They want the RNC to be autonomous but they'll work with the Trump campaign. They need Trump to help raise the money but they want their vendors to be the ones to spend the money."

But Trump may be more reliant on the national party than past presidential nominees, since his campaign has invested relatively little in field staff, voter data or a fundraising operation.

Some of Trump's infrastructure deficiencies can be traced to his unwillingness to dig deep into his own fortune to finance his campaign, which he has pledged from the beginning to self-finance.

Entering into a joint fundraising agreement and leaning on the party for cash and staff would help fill that void, but also could undermine his rhetoric about being independent from the party's donor class.

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