Presidential campaign financial disclosures released on Monday night revealed that Donald Trump’s team spent a significant portion of its funds on legal fees.
Since the start of 2023, Trump has taken in roughly $53 million from fundraising, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Despite the high fundraising numbers, much of the funding has been used to manage legal fees accrued by Trump in the last year.
The filings indicate that Trump’s political committees have spent roughly $25 million on legal funds during the first half of the year, but an anonymous source has said that the number is closer to $40 million in the last year, per the AJC.
The majority of the bills have been covered by Trump’s political action committee (PAC) Save America, which covered roughly $21.6 million of the legal fees, according to CBS News. In 2021 and 2022 combined, the PAC covered $16 million.
At the beginning of 2022, the Save America PAC had over $100 million on hand, per The Washington Post.
The most recent financial disclosures indicate that the PAC started 2023 with just $18 million on hand, which has since dropped to roughly $3.7 million.
PAC funds covered legal expenses accrued by Trump and his associates involved in investigations, per CBS News.
Prior to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign announcement, the Republican National Committee covered more than $2 million in legal fees; however, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told CNN that the committee “cannot pay legal bills for any candidate that’s announced.”
Trump’s legal fees will undoubtedly continue to grow following his indictment by a grand jury on Tuesday for his alleged actions after the 2020 election and for the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Just before the public announcement, Trump called the indictment “prosecutorial misconduct” because the jury “wanted to put it right in the middle of my campaign,” according to The Dallas Express.
Trump now faces 75 total charges across three indictments.
In response to the growing expenses, Trump’s allies have created a new legal defense fund called the Patriot Legal Defense Fund Inc., as reported by CBS News. The fund will not financially support Trump and his family but will focus on paying the legal bills of his associates.
