July 30, 2023

Trump’s PAC Has Spent $40 Million on Legal Bills This Year

Trump appears pale as he looks at a teleprompter while speaking at the Turning Point Action Conference.

Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EFE/ZUMA Press

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After former president Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he raised more than $250 million in donations by pushing the “Big Lie”—claiming that he had actually won and needed the money to contest the results. Some of the money that came pouring in went to pay down his  campaign’s debts, or into the bank accounts of the Republican National Committee. But a big chunk went to a new political action committee he named Save America. 

Now, as Trump faces multiple criminal indictments and yet more potential prosecutions, the Save America PAC is spending tens of millions on legal fees for the former president and his witnesses. The group will report more than $40 million in legal spending for the first half of this year, the Washington Post reported Saturday. The PAC had previously reported spending about $16 million on legal fees since the 2020 election—the majority of which went to firms representing Trump in investigations and lawsuits.

In case you need a refresher: In early April, Trump was arrested in New York and charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, related to allegations that he made hush money payments in 2016 to cover up an affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels. In June, the Justice Department filed federal criminal charges against Trump (the first time in history it had done so against a former president) alleging that Trump had hoarded classified military secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate—violating the Espionage Act, making false statements, and conspiring to obstruct justice. This week, special counsel Jack Smith filed a new indictment in that case, alleging that Trump instructed a maintenance worker to delete key security camera footage in an effort to obstruct the investigation.

As legal expenses related to these cases and others stack up, the financial pressure on the Save America PAC is now so high that it recently requested a refund of $60 million it had transferred to another group supporting Trump, the New York Times reported. 

Meanwhile, some experts argue that Trump is violating campaign finance law by having his PAC pay his legal bills. Under their reasoning, because Trump is running for president in 2024, the PAC’s payments are a kind of campaign contribution and should be subject to the standard $3,300 contribution limit. “Payments by a PAC that exceed the contribution limit are contributions to the candidate and are unlawful,” Jason Torchinsky, a campaign finance expert and lawyer with the firm Holtzman Vogel, told the New York Times in February. Adav Noti, vice president of the Campaign Legal Center, called the matter a “gray area.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

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If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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