The Hollywood Reporter sussed out the evidence. An email from a firm called Extra Mile, soliciting people to be paid $50 to attend "an event in support of Donald Trump and an upcoming exciting announcement he will be making." Instagram photos of an actor in attendance that day. A reference in that email to Gotham Government Relations, the firm that hired Extra Mile and which Trump had used in the past.

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Gotham, which put the event together, produced a video of the Trump announcement that it posted on YouTube.

At the time, the revelation didn't make much of a splash. The aftermath of Trump's announcement focused mostly on his comments about immigration. In June 2015, it also didn't seem like it was worth spending a lot of energy on evaluating the then-very-unlikely chance that Trump would go very far in the campaign. This was just a bit of icing on the weird Trump-announcement cake.

What Levine found, though, was that there was another level of detail to those actors showing up. In short: The Trump campaign failed to pay the $12,000 bill from Gotham until about a month after a complaint had been filed with the FEC. The delay between the time Gotham was hired -- June -- and when it was paid -- October -- essentially means that Gotham floated credit to the campaign for those four months, potentially making it a campaign contribution.

Ultimately, the FEC decided that the sum at stake was so small and the lack of information about whether or not such a delay in payment was customary that it wouldn't take action.

That said: Another Trump debt -- the debt that launched his campaign -- was not paid until after someone raised the issue. Just as with Trump's pledge to give $1 million to veterans' groups in January, which also went unpaid for four months.