The Super PAC Footing Trump’s Legal Bills Is Running Out of Money.

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Donald Trump‘s legal defense is expensive, and the invoices continue to pile up as the former president drains money from his political action committees to pay his attorneys. Trump has been using Save America, a super PAC he controls, to help pay for his legal bills, but after spending tens of millions of dollars on legal consulting, it may be running out of funds.

According to the latest campaign finance records, the Save America leadership PAC spent $4.6 million on legal bills for Trump and his associates in March while only bringing in $5 million last month. Trump’s spending on legal bills amounted to a quarter of the total expenditures by his political action committees in March, The Washington Post reported.

So far this year, $16.7 million in funds from Trump’s PACs have gone toward legal bills. At the end of last month, the PACs owed another $900,000 to legal firms. In total, Trump has expended approximately $86 million total in legal fees, according to The Post.

Last month, Trump claimed through his attorneys that he could not afford a $350 million appeal bond from his New York court case regarding his falsification of business records. Trump’s attorneys wrote in a filing that the former president was unable to secure an agreement with an insurer to issue a court bond, in part because they said insurers were unwilling to accept Trump’s real estate as collateral. In September, a court ruled that Trump used fraudulent practices to inflate the worth of his real estate assets.

Trump used his inability to pay the bond in fundraising appeals, leading to his greatest fundraising period since his mugshot became public.

This week, a New York jury trial continues that will determine whether Trump is guilty of paying adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to remain silent about their affair in the hopes it would better his chances at being elected president in 2016. Trump has been caught napping during portions of the proceedings.

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The former president has helped fund Save America PAC — and therefore his legal bills — by refunding money to it from Make America Great Again Inc., another Trump-affiliated super PAC. But those refunds are limited by the amount Save America gave MAGA, Inc. during the 2022 election cycle.

So far this presidential campaign, President Joe Biden and the Democrats have far outpaced the amount of funds raised by Trump and the Republicans, even though the Republican National Committee reported its best fundraising month in March, bringing in $20 million. But the RNC already spent half of that money last month, leaving the party with only $21 million cash on hand. That’s less than half of the $45 million reported to be in the Democratic National Committee’s coffers at the end of March.



Source link: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-super-pac-legal-bills-1235008114/

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