Trump's campaign fund is a legal fees fund

Former president Donald Trump’s political group spent more than $40 million on legal costs in the first half of 2023 to defend Trump.

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Save America, the former president’s PAC, is expected to disclose about $40.2 million in legal spending in a filing expected Monday.

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That total is more than any other expense the PAC has incurred during Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and, according to federal filings from earlier this month, more than Trump’s campaign raised in the second quarter of 2023. It will bring the PAC’s post-presidential legal spending to about $56 million.

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Trump advisers told The Washington Post that the PAC, which raises most of its money from small-dollar contributions by Trump supporters across the country, is footing the legal bills for almost anyone drawn into the investigations who requests help from the former president and his advisers.

  WaPo

If you can get a bunch of rubes to pay your legal bills, hey, why wouldn't you?

Trump’s advisers say the costs of providing lawyers for dozens of people are necessary and will continue mushrooming as investigations continue, trials are scheduled and the possibility of more charges looms.

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Paul Seamus Ryan, a campaign finance expert, said he didn’t necessarily see any “legal red flags” with the spending, noting that Trump had wide berth to spend money on legal fees — but that it was far more than any other 2024 presidential candidate would be spending at this point.

“It’s an extraordinary sum of money,” he said. “At the end of the day it’s up to the donors to decide if that’s the way they want their money spent. My sense is if you’re giving money to Trump in 2023, you’re fine with it.”

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Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the former president, said Save America was paying legal fees for those who worked for Trump “to protect these innocent people from financial ruin and prevent their lives from being completely destroyed” by what he called “unlawful harassment” from investigators.

Innocent.

It is not unusual for political campaigns, or companies for that matter, to pay for legal costs of their employees, if the legal issues involve their work. In Trump’s case, however, prosecutors have suggested there may be more to it than that.

According to the most recent indictment in the documents case, a private message chat with Nauta about who could be trusted - "loyal" - involved a representative of the Save America PAC.

The PAC’s own fundraising and creation is under investigation [...] . Much of the money it is using to pay for legal bills was raised on false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

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The backstory to the new charges underscores just how complicated things can get when serving as a lawyer for a Trump employee.

[Walt] Nauta, who investigators long considered a key witness in the classified documents investigation, has been represented for many months by lawyer Stan Woodward, with Save America footing the bills. Woodward also represents several other Trump-linked clients who have been subpoenaed as part of Smith’s investigations, including an IT worker named Yuscil Taveras.

For much of the classified documents probe, there did not appear to be a conflict between Nauta and Taveras.

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After Trump and Nauta were indicted in June, however, Taveras decided he had more he wanted to tell the authorities.

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Taveras offered information implicating all three defendants in an alleged conspiracy to cover up evidence, these people said.

Legal ethics rules bar attorneys from arguing adverse positions in a case.

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Once Taveras’s position put him potentially at odds with Nauta’s defense, a judge reviewed the issue. [...] A second lawyer — not paid by the PAC — was brought in to provide legal advice to Taveras, who then spoke to investigators.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 12:24 pm:

UPDATE 08/01/2023: The Daily Beast reports that Trump's legal expenses are about half of what was reported.

The early news reports—sourced from “people familiar with the filing”—and the disclosure itself don’t provide enough data to show where the error lay. However, the seemingly neat halfway split could suggest an accounting mistake—or, alternatively, possibly unreliable or intentionally misleading sourcing. Those fees do appear to extend to an array of law firms—indicating financial support for a long list of possible witnesses in several cases—as well as to Trump’s own stable of attorneys.

The Trump operation had spent so much on lawyers that they opened a separate legal fund on July 19 and reportedly asked a Trump-aligned super PAC to refund $60 million in shady transfers ahead of his candidate announcement last fall.

The filing also shows that Save America raised just $15.6 million in the first six months of the year while spending nearly double that amount—$30.2 million. But the accounting discrepancy could also reflect a systemic problem—Trump’s full operation also filed more than two dozen corrected reports across several committees on Monday, going back as far as January 2021.

  Daily Beast