More than $27M in Trump campaign fundraising went to legal costs in the last six months of 2023
Former President Donald Trump’s affiliated committees spent about $27 million on lawyers’ bills and related legal fees in the last six months of 2023.
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump’s affiliated committees spent about $27 million on lawyers’ bills and related legal fees in the last six months of 2023, new federal election filings show, bringing the total for a year that included four separate indictments to almost $50 million.
Trump’s political fundraising apparatus is sprawling, but the new filings show that the price of lawyers is weighing him down. Still, Trump, the GOP presidential front-runner, has seized on the legal cases against him as a potent fundraising tool, with his booking in a Georgia election case giving him what his campaign said was a record single-day haul.
Save America PAC, one of the groups Trump uses to raise money, spent $24.3 million on “legal consulting” in the last six months of 2023, according to federal election filings. That includes payments to firms that include lawyers like John Lauro, who is representing Trump in the case related to his effort to overturn the 2020 election; Todd Blanche, who also represents Trump in the New York hush money case; and Alina Habba, who represents Trump in the defamation case filed against him by author E. Jean Carroll and has appeared at his criminal arraignments.
While the Save America PAC raised $36 million over the last six months, $30 million came across six monthly payments from Make America Great Again Inc., a Trump-affiliated super PAC. While Save America helped provide early funding for MAGA Inc. when it launched at the beginning of Trump’s presidential bid, it appears that much of that money has been returned to Save America, which has been the primary vehicle for paying Trump’s legal fees. In the first six months of 2023, Save America PAC took more than $12 million from MAGA Inc.
Save America ended the year with just $5 million in cash banked away after having spent $35.2 million in total in the second half of 2023, almost as much as it raised.
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