The Republican National Committee has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to contractors closely connected to the organization’s chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel.

One contract went to her husband’s insurance company. Two others went to businesses whose executives recently donated to Ronna for Chair, a largely inactive political action committee that McDaniel controls. She had set it up in 2015, when she successfully ran for chair of the Republican Party in Michigan, her home state.

The companies won the contracts soon after McDaniel became the party’s top official. She was picked for the position by President Donald Trump after the 2016 election.

The RNC vendor payments and PAC contributions, detailed in federal tax filings and campaign finance reports, mirror a trend of transactions with favored contractors and employees previously reported by ProPublica.

The RNC conflict-of-interest policy states that employees “should avoid even the appearance of impropriety,” such as steering work to “members of an employee’s family” and businesses “with which the employee has a financial relationship.”

An RNC spokesman, Mike Reed, did not make McDaniel available for an interview. In a statement, he said ProPublica’s reporting was an attempt to make “innocuous RNC spending items seem scandalous,” and he accused ProPublica of harboring “a severe bias against conservatives and President Trump.”

Under McDaniel, the RNC is generating and disbursing record amounts, bringing in about $240 million last year and spending just over $190 million. And public scrutiny of its spending is increasing. ProPublica reported last month that in 2019 the RNC obscured payments to its chief of staff, who executes vendor contracts and is part of a tight network of operatives who have reaped financial rewards during the Trump era. This week, The New York Times reported that since 2017 the tiny circle, including a husband-and-wife duo of former RNC chiefs of staff and Trump’s campaign chairman, Brad Parscale, have billed the campaign, the RNC and other Republican groups some $75 million.

During McDaniel’s first year as chairwoman, the RNC hired a large, privately held insurance brokerage firm called Hylant to conduct an insurance review and liability assessment. Reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show that the RNC specifically paid Hylant’s Detroit branch almost $40,000 for the company’s services.