Unraveling Trump’s ‘Offi cial Campaign Legal Fund’

With Roger Sollenberger, Political Reporter

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The Big Dig this week… Making sense of this supposedly $250 million that Trump raised for his “Official Campaign Legal Fund.”

Near the end of the Jan. 6 Committee hearing on Monday, the panel seemed to drop an unexpected campaign finance bombshell: President Donald Trump and his allies raised $250 million after the election, while telling supporters that their money would support an “Official Campaign Legal Fund” that didn’t exist.

That $250 million, the Jan. 6 Committee said, didn’t go to the non-existent account, but a whole lot of it did go to Trump and his friends.

“Not only was there a Big Lie, there was also a big rip-off,” said committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).

The news turned heads, sparking widespread media coverage and sending “$250 million” trending on Twitter.

But to those who have followed reports about the campaign’s fundraising and spending, it mostly wasn’t news. In fact, while the committee’s narrative was correct in a broad sense, the claims themselves are a bit misleading.

Here’s how it really happened.

Money maze

Senior Trump campaign advisers acknowledged to the Jan. 6 Committee that the “Official Election Defense Fund” wasn’t a thing, but, in their words, a “marketing ploy” designed to wring cash out of their supporters.

That gimmick included hundreds of versions of fundraising emails the Trump team sent to millions of supporters, which the New York Attorney General’s office will reportedly be investigating as possible fraud.

The $250 million question, however, came in through a number of channels. And Trump’s armada of fundraising committees makes it bewilderingly hard to follow.

‘Friend, I need your help’

Most of the money, filings show, came through a joint fundraising committee with the Republican National Committee, called “Trump Make America Again Committee.” Smaller sums went directly to the official campaign committee, as well as another joint fundraiser with the RNC.

TMAGA then split its haul between Trump and the RNC, routing the overwhelming share of the money directly to Trump’s Save America leadership PAC, which netted $170 million in the four weeks after the election alone. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump reported that more than half the money Save America took in came from retirees.

For an idea of how powerful the full apparatus was, The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay reported in December 2020—about a month after the election was called for Joe Biden—that the Trump machine and the RNC had together hauled in a staggering half a billion dollars, a large amount of it on the backs of Trump’s lies about the election.

Where did it go?

The Jan. 6 panel’s presentation, however, appeared to mislead some observers, who connected the fake legal fund to the $250 million. Did all of that money just… disappear?

No. Trump’s fundraising and spending had been publicly disclosed over the last 18 months in a series of federal campaign finance filings, and has been widely reported, including by The Daily Beast.

The Save America leadership PAC, however—now Trump’s flagship committee—is something of a “slush fund” Trump can use for basically anything he wants.

So while the committee hadn’t discovered a secret $250 million stash, they did tell the story in a way that got attention.

A storytelling masterclass

The campaign team spent some of the dough on the Jan. 6 rally itself, which the committee pointed out, highlighting $5 million in expenses to a company called Event Strategies for staging services.

But the other payments the panel showcased in its presentation had no direct correlation to the rally, and were months removed from the event.

The $1 million gift the Jan. 6 Committee showed going from Save America to nonprofit America First Policy Institute came in late June, The Daily Beast reported. That’s weeks before the group backed Trump’s now-defunct First Amendment lawsuit against social media companies, which a judge tossed last month.

The other $1 million gift, to the right-wing dark money group Conservative Partnership Institute, came in the fall of 2021. That group hired Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows weeks after he left the White House (and counts Trump election lawyer Cleta Mitchell as an adviser) but the nonprofit did not play a reported role in organizing the Jan. 6 event.

The Jan. 6 panel also pointed out that about $204,000 went to the Trump Hotel Collection. Those donations were also spread out over 2021, filings show.

What’s more, the Jan. 6 Committee still hasn’t completed its fundraising investigation. Remember that half a billion dollars and the joint fundraising committees? That fundraising implicates not just Trump, but the RNC as well. The committee has subpoenaed the RNC’s marketing server provider, Salesforce, for data connected to the RNC’s fundraising efforts after the election.

Trump’s various campaign accounts currently sit on around $125 million, The Daily Beast reported, waiting for an expected Trump 2024 presidential campaign.

From Roger’s Notebook

Blood money. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the Campaign Legal Center has filed a complaint against Daniel Defense, the company that made the Uvalde shooter’s semiautomatic rifle, accusing the firearms manufacturer of breaking the law when it made a $100,000 donation to the Gun Owners Action Fund super PAC (on Jan. 6, 2021, no less).

Daniel Defense, as a federal contractor, is barred from making political donations.

But Daniel Defense is not alone. Sig Sauer, another major gun company, also made a $100,000 contribution to the same super PAC, one week earlier. According to a government database, Sig Sauer was a federal contractor at the time.

CLC had filed a complaint against Sig Sauer, but it remains unresolved in FEC limbo. That’s because…

Surprise, surprise. The Federal Election Commission’s three Republican commissioners have blocked yet another investigation into the Trump campaign. This one was big, concerning $800 million in expenses that the campaign hid under a single shell company.

The company, American Made Media Consultants, was created by staffers in Trump’s inner circle, reportedly with top White House aide Jared Kushner’s personal approval. In December 2020, when I was at Salon, I reported that Trump wanted the shell company so he could keep an eye on how much money went to former campaign manager Brad Parscale, whose own company had banked about $100 million during the 2016 election.

We can add this to Trump’s undefeated record; he’s more than 40-0 against FEC complaints.

Is that possible? Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) just filed a financial disclosure reporting zero dollars—zero— in royalties from his 2021 book, “Do What You Said You Would Do.”

The book was released in November, so it’s possible Jordan’s first royalty check didn’t arrive until 2022, meaning we’ll have to wait another year to see how he did. But thanks to Politico, we do know he sold some: the National Republican Congressional Committee reportedly bought $75,000 worth of bulk copies, giving signed copies to donors as “mementos.”

Depending on the terms of Jordan’s publishing agreement, that purchase alone could have put him ahead of his friend Rep. Matt Gaetz’s initial book sales blitz, which earned him an abysmal $25,000 in royalties over the last four months of 2020.

This would look like a standard case of a book not “earning out”—meaning the book didn’t sell enough for the publisher to recoup whatever they gave the author for an advance. But House rules actually prohibit Members of Congress from taking book advances. That means it’s a less lucrative enterprise than the Senate, where members like Ted Cruz can bank hundreds of thousands of dollars before they write one word.

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More from the Beast’s Politics desk

Call Maury. I reported on Tuesday that GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker actually has a 10-year-old son that was previously unknown to the public, after years of Walker chastising the Black community for not being active fathers. It’s unclear if Walker has much of any contact at all with the child. A source close to the family told The Daily Beast that Walker doesn’t see the boy.

No, seriously, call Maury. I reported this morning that the 10-year-old boy isn’t the only undisclosed child of Herschel Walker’s. It turns out he has another son, this one 13 years old, and a daughter who’s about 40 that Walker had while he was in college.

Gonna need to see some ID. Francisco Alvarado reported earlier this week about an investigation into a Nebraska voter ID initiative where people collecting signatures for a petition appear to have tried to dupe people into signing the petition even if they were opposed. Gov. Pete Ricketts’ mom bankrolled the initiative.

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