Trump Has Spent Over $100 Million On Legal Fees Since He Left Office – None Of It His Own Money

Since his presidency ended in January 2021, Donald Trump has spent more than $100 million on legal fees.

“I have $100 million worth of legal fees,” Trump stated during a speech he made in Sioux City, Iowa. “And they’re doing good. At least I have good lawyers because you can spend $100 million and have lousy lawyers too. It happens.”

According to a review of federal records, Trump averaged over $90,000 daily in legal-related costs for over three years – none of which he paid for with his own money.

Instead, he relied almost entirely on donations to fight the results of the 2020 election, but those accounts are nearly drained.

Trump raised $254 million online from November 4, 2020, the day after the election, to President Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021, as he asked supporters to fuel an “election defense fund.”

The contributions came so fast that on November 9, 2020, the former president formed the political action committee Save America to store all of this money.

However, little money went toward this election’s recounts and other legal challenges. Some went to the former president’s lawyers during his second impeachment, related to the Capitol riot. 

Trump started to use the money to fund his post-presidential political operation and what would ultimately become his growing legal teams. In February 2021, he renamed his 2020 committee “MAGA PAC.”

By the end of 2021, Save America, which kept bringing in new donations, made up a large portion of the former president’s fundraising: $105 million.

In 2022, Save America and MAGA PAC spent enormous amounts on legal bills and related expenses. 

In August 2022, the F.B.I. searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for missing classified documents, further increasing his legal fees.

Trump spent nearly $27.2 million on legal-related costs for the year.

While he was preparing to announce his 2024 run late in 2022, he faced a dilemma. His PAC could not directly spend money to elect him president, so Save America transferred $60 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc.

Save America had $18.3 million at the start of 2023. But Trump’s legal expenses were about to spiral. He had first been indicted in March 2023 in New York, and three other indictments soon followed.

He spent nearly $60 million on legal and investigation-related costs, which included his lawyers, a document-production company and an expert witness in the former president’s New York civil fraud case.

In early 2023, Trump changed his plan to bring more money into Save America, the PAC, which pays his legal expenses. 

At first, one cent of every dollar he raised online went to Save America, and the rest went toward his 2024 campaign. However, with Save America short on cash to pay lawyers, he increased that to 10%.

However, by June 2023, Save America had less than $4 million in the bank. In an unusual move, Trump asked his super PAC for a refund of the $60 million he gave just months earlier so that Save America could continue paying for his legal expenses.

When the year was over, more than $42 million had been returned from Trump’s super PAC to Save America.

With his first trial in the New York case related to hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 starting last week, Trump’s legal costs kept rising. 

The over $100 million in legal spending since leaving office does not include expenditures from the former president’s 2024 campaign, which has not paid for his legal bills. 

Trump’s super PAC refunded another $10 million in January and February to cover his ongoing legal costs. However, only $7.75 million is left to be refunded. Save America had less than $2 million at the end of March.

Even though Trump’s team has said the Republican National Committee would not pay his legal bills, his new shared fundraising agreement with the party directs a portion of donations to Save America before the party itself.

Mississippi’s national committeeman Henry Barbour, son of former RNC Chairman Haley Barbour, proposed a measure to ban the RNC from paying the former president’s spiraling legal bills. The resolution died after Trump’s daughter-in-law became the RNC’s co-chair last month.