Day 452: Donors Who Give $100 To Trump’s Reelection Give $21.41 to His Lawyers
Donald Trump has previously claimed that the Forbes’ estimate of his net worth is wrong by over a factor of two. He proclaimed in 2015 that he was actually worth more than $11 billion, not the $4.5 billion that Forbes estimated. Bloomberg pegged Trump’s wealth to be under $3 billion.
But for a billionaire of any ilk, Trump certainly likes to spend other peoples’ money. Like when he retooled the Trump Foundation into simply spending others’ money, rather than donate a dime himself. He got the money from other individual donors or in shady ways, like moving money away from a kids-cancer charity and into his foundation.
In a similar vein, Trump is now pumping money out of his reelection campaign and into his attorneys’ coffers.
More than one-fifth of the $3.9 million that President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign has spent this year has gone to legal fees, the campaign’s latest quarterly Federal Election Commission filing shows.
About $835,000 in payments for “legal consulting” were made to eight firms and the Trump Corporation, with the most — $347,000 — going to Jones Day. Another $185,000 went to the firm Larocca Hornik Rosen Greenberg & Blaha. About $24,000 went to the Trump Corporation.
The money is being spent both on Russia-related matters and Stormy Daniels-related matters. Interestingly, the Daniels payoff may have been an illegal campaign contribution for the 2016 election. This has caused Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen to argue that the payoff was unrelated to the campaign. If that’s true, then perhaps paying lawyers to handle that issue shouldn’t come out of the reelection fund.
People are writing the Trump reelection campaign checks from bank accounts that are far smaller than Trump’s. With federal election laws limiting donation size, Trump’s team is trying to reengage small-money donors. Many of them probably believe that their money is going to things that actually involvement the reelection bid: posters, advertising and a competent team dedicated to his actual reelection.
Instead, over 21 percent of the donation is going toward paying Trump’s lawyers, including those dealing with Trump’s alleged affair with an adult film star.
452 days in, 1010 to go
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