The group has contributed about $8.4 million so far directly to Republican campaigns and committees, while devoting $7 million to Trump’s lawyers and another $2 million to the nonprofits, which employ former members of his administration, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Legal fees are expected to climb, Trump advisers say, as he employs a growing retinue of lawyers to fend off federal, state and county-level investigations.
Available filings, which disclose payments only through the end of August, show Save America sent its single biggest check in the last 20 months not to a Trump-backed candidate or to advertising aimed at swing-state voters. Instead, the $3-million payment went to a Florida law firm representing the former president in the Justice Department’s investigation of his handling of government documents at Mar-a-Lago and its probe of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, aimed at keeping Trump in power. Trump attorney Christopher Kise demanded the fee up front before he accepted the role. (A series of payments to multiple groups working unsuccessfully to oust Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) surpassed $3 million.)
Legal expenses incurred by Save America exploded this summer, as multiple probes of Trump’s conduct intensified, from the capital, where lawmakers and prosecutors are investigating possible wrongdoing, to New York and Georgia, where authorities are scrutinizing the former president, his political associates and members of his family.
Cash doled out to lawyers by the leadership PAC nearly tripled between May and June, as authorities sent subpoenas to a wide range of people involved in efforts to reverse Trump’s November 2020 loss. That sum nearly doubled in July compared to June, reaching almost $1 million.
And in August, Save America spent more than $3.8 million on legal consulting, according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission. The committee has spent $42 million in total so far this cycle — with much of that sum going to payroll, event staging and fundraising — and had more than $92 million in reserve at the end of the summer.
In response to questions about the use of donor money to cover the former president’s legal bills, Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich accused Democrats of “weaponizing taxpayer dollars with fake investigations and meritless cases in an attempt to intimidate and silence Republicans.”
State-level Republicans have also used party resources to defray legal costs related to Trump’s attempts to stay in power. The Georgia GOP paid more than $20,000 this summer to the firm representing party officials, including the chairman, David Shafer, before the House panel probing the Jan. 6 attack. Another $25,000 went to the firm representing Shafer and other members of a slate of alternate electors backing Trump despite his loss in the state. Shafer declined to comment.
In Arizona, the state GOP has paid more than $127,000 to a pair of law firms representing the party’s chairwoman, Kelli Ward, in her lawsuit seeking to block the House’s Jan. 6 committee from obtaining her phone records and in the party’s litigation against Maricopa County over the hiring of poll workers, according to state and federal filings. It was unclear how much of those expenses were related to those two legal battles; a spokeswoman for the state party did not respond to requests for comment.
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