Trump steering donations into PAC
Might use funds to pay legal fees
Facing intensifying investigations, former president Donald Trump has begun diverting more of the money he is raising away from his 2024 presidential campaign and into a political action committee that he has used to pay his personal legal fees.
The change, which went unannounced except in the fine print of his online disclosures, raises fresh questions about how Trump is paying for his mounting legal bills — which could run into millions of dollars — as he prepares for at least two criminal trials, and whether his PAC, Save America, is facing a financial crunch.
When Trump kicked off his 2024 campaign in November, for every dollar raised online, 99 cents went to his campaign, and a penny went to Save America.
But Internet archival records show that sometime in February or March, he adjusted that split. Now his campaign’s share has been reduced to 90 percent of donations, and 10 percent goes to Save America. Based on fundraising figures announced by his campaign, the maneuver may already have diverted at least $1.5 million to Save America.
And the existence of the group has allowed Trump to have his small donors pay for his legal expenses, rather than paying for them himself.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, did not answer detailed questions about why the Trump operation has changed how the funds he is raising are being split. Save America technically owns the list of e-mail addresses and phone numbers of his supporters and the campaign is effectively paying the PAC for access to that list, he explained.
The different rules governing what political action committees and candidate campaign committees can pay for are both dizzying and somewhat in dispute. But generally, a PAC cannot spend money directly on the candidate’s campaign, and a campaign committee cannot directly pay for things that benefit the candidate personally.
For more than a year, before Trump was a 2024 candidate, Save America has been paying for 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 the beginning of 2023, the PAC’s cash on hand was down to $18 million, filings show. The rest had been spent on staff salaries, on the costs of Trump’s political activities last year, and in other ways. That included the $60 million that was transferred to MAGA Inc., a super PAC that backs Trump. More than $16 million went to pay legal bills.
In the run-up to Trump’s latest campaign, his legal bills exploded. Save America spent $1.9 million in what it identified as legal expenses in the first half of 2022. That figure ballooned to nearly $14.6 million in the second half of last year, federal records show.