The New York Times reports that the Trump campaign has filed a complaint at the FEC against Kamala Harris for using the Biden-Harris campaign funds for her own campaign following Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race.

Most campaign finance lawyers I know believe that she can use the funds because it was a committee for both Biden and Harris. That’s the position of the nonpartisan watchdog Campaign Legal Center, for example.

Charlie Spies, a Republican election lawyer for for a time worked for the Trump campaign, wrote recently an oped in the Wall Street Journal where he advanced an alternative argument, based on the idea that Harris did not have the right to spend the money as the VP. Brendan Fischer points out that the argument would lead to some ludicrous results and makes no sense given how we think of presidential and vice presidential candidates.

The Times does not link to the complaint, so I’m guessing it’s going to make similar arguments to Spies, but we’ll see. Conservative campaign finance scholar Brad Smith (who was going to testify for Trump at his trial) said on Fox Business before this complaint was filed that the Spies argument was good but that the Harris argument is at least “plausible.” He did not think a judge would get involved, and I can think of no real-time enforcement by a judge of federal campaign finance laws.

Instead, as Smith explained, this will go to the FEC where it would take at least 60 days for anything to happen. And the FEC could well deadlock as it often does. The issue could then eventually get decided and end up in courts years later. We could be looking at the results of the 2028 elections or later before there’s something definitive.

In the meantime, the filing of the complaint gives Trump legal fodder to say that Harris engaged in a greater campaign finance violation than the one that formed the basis for turning his NY business records misdemeanors into felonies. I expect we’ll hear that a lot.