Facing multiple intensifying investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has quietly begun diverting more of the money he’s raising from his 2024 presidential campaign to a political action committee he’s used to pay his fees personal legal
The change, which was not announced except in the fine print of his online disclosures, raises new questions about how Mr. Trump is paying his mounting legal bills, which could reach millions of dollars, as he prepares for at least two criminal trials. and if his PAC, Save America, faces a financial crisis.
When Mr. Trump kicked off his 2024 campaign in November, for every dollar raised online, 99 cents went to his campaign and one cent went to Save America.
But Internet Archive records show that sometime in February or March, he adjusted that split. Now, his campaign share has been reduced to 90% of donations, with 10% going to Save America.
The effect of this change is potentially substantial: According to fundraising figures announced by his campaign, the fine-print maneuver may have already diverted at least $1.5 million to Save America.
And the group’s existence has allowed Mr. Trump to have his small donors pay his legal fees, rather than paying them himself.
Steven Cheung, spokesman for Mr. Trump did not answer detailed questions about why Operation Trump has changed the way the funds he raises are divided. Save America technically has the list of supporters’ email addresses and phone numbers, one of the former president’s most valuable assets, and the campaign is effectively paying the PAC to access that list, he explained.
“Because the campaign wants to make sure that every dollar given to President Trump is spent in the most cost-effective way, a fair market analysis was done to determine that email list rentals would be more efficient by changing the distribution of fundraising between the two entities,” Mr. Cheung said in a written statement.
The different rules governing what political action committees and nominating campaign committees can pay are both dizzying and somewhat contentious. But generally, a PAC can’t spend money directly on a candidate’s campaign, and a campaign committee can’t directly pay for things that personally benefit the candidate.
For more than a year, before Mr. Trump was a 2024 candidate, Save America has been paying bills related to various investigations into the former president and his allies. In February 2022, the PAC announced that it had $122 million in its coffers.
By early 2023, the PAC’s cash was down to $18 million, the documents show. The rest had been spent on staff salaries, the costs of Mr. Trump’s political activities last year — including some spending on other candidates and groups — and in other ways. That included $60 million that was transferred to MAGA Inc., a super PAC that supports Mr. trump And more than $16 million went toward paying legal bills.
The rivals of Mr. Trump is not sharing his online income equally with an affiliated PAC. The websites of former Vice President Mike Pence, former ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina direct all proceeds to their campaign committees. The same goes for Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and Vivek Ramaswamy.
“I believe that in this particular situation, specifically because of the use of the leadership PAC to pay legal fees and potentially other expenses that would be an illegal personal use of campaign money, there is an unusual incentive for the leadership PAC to leadership take on more than usual. I would,” said Adav Noti, senior vice president and legal director of the Campaign Legal Center.
In the period before the last campaign of Mr. Trump, his legal bills increased in magnitude. Save America spent $1.9 million on what it identified as legal expenses in the first half of 2022. That figure rose to nearly $14.6 million in the second half of last year, records show federal
By late 2022, a Trump adviser said Save America PAC had set aside about $20 million to cover legal expenses.
Since then, Mr. Trump has been indicted twice, once by a Manhattan grand jury on charges stemming from a hush money payment to a porn star, and once by a federal grand jury in Florida on charges that include violations of the espionage derived from The possession of Mr. Trump of classified material and government records long after leaving office.
A top lawyer, Todd Blanche, left his white-collar firm in April to join the former president’s legal team and is now representing him in both cases, and Trump recently met with a dozen lawyers in Florida.
The legal problems of Mr. Trump are deeply intertwined with his political campaign and fundraising efforts. His campaign store sells an “I Stand With Trump” T-shirt featuring the date of his indictment in Manhattan (“03.30.2023”) for $36; recently added a second t-shirt with his Florida indictment date (“06.08.2023”) for $38. Half of the featured items on the store’s landing page show a fake photo and the words “not guilty.”
And the usual legal strategy of Mr. Trump — delay, delay, delay — could prove costly as overlapping teams of white-collar lawyers defend him in the federal case and the Manhattan criminal case, as well as the investigation in Georgia, where Mr. Trump could face another indictment this summer for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. He also faces an intensified investigation by special counsel Jack Smith into his efforts to cling to power after losing the elections
It is not yet clear whether Mr. Trump will try to use campaign funds to pay for lawyers, if he runs into trouble with the political action committee, and if that move would violate spending rules.
“You can use the campaign to pay legal bills that arise from the activity of candidates or office, and of course some of the current legal matters fall into that category, and some don’t, and some are in a gray area “, said Mr. said Noti. “It really depends on what topic we’re talking about.”
Jason Torchinsky, a Republican election lawyer, said he believed Mr. Trump was barred from using Save America donations to pay his personal legal expenses now that he is a candidate, arguing that doing so would be “an excessive contribution” under Federal Election Commission precedent. And he said Mr. Trump could not use the campaign money at all, because it would qualify as personal use.
There have been indications that the campaign of Mr. Trump has been carefully monitoring his spending.
He has mostly attended events organized by other groups, rather than organizing his own large-scale political rallies, which have been the lifeblood of his past two presidential runs and are one of his favorite parts of the campaign . These demonstrations are expensive, costing at least $150,000 and usually more than $400,000.
Mr. Trump has held only one large-scale rally in the seven months he has been in office, with a second scheduled for July 1 in South Carolina, the first in an early nominating state. (A rally in Iowa on May 13 was canceled after a tornado warning, though the weather cleared and Mr. DeSantis organized an impromptu event nearby.)
People familiar with Trump’s campaign plans have said the dearth of rallies was as much about getting Mr. Trump to engage with voters in a more traditional way. The people also suggested more large-scale events could happen in the fall, as the primary race heats up.
But it is expected that the fundraising increases experienced by Mr. Trump after his first impeachment in late March and again in June will cloud a broader slowdown in fundraising. His campaign announced that he had raised $12 million in the first week after his first indictment and $7 million in the week after his second. He will then disclose the status of his PAC and campaign finances in federal filings in July.
Mr Trump is unusually reliant on online fundraising. He has only held one major fundraiser that was billed as such by his team: the event in Bedminster on the evening of his indictment. It raised $2 million.
