President Biden used campaign donations to help pay his legal bills last year during the special counsel’s probe into his handling of classified documents, according to two people familiar with the matter and an Axios review of campaign finance records.
The payments, made through the Democratic National Committee, are at odds with the Biden campaign’s recent attacks on Donald Trump for spending his campaign funds on legal fees.
The DNC — which has been collecting the biggest donations to Biden’s re-election effort — paid more than $1.5 million to lawyers or firms representing Biden during the probe, according to the committee’s financial filings.
The Biden team increasingly has attacked Trump for using campaign donations to pay for his myriad legal fights.
Last weekend, the Biden campaign’s finance chair said on MSNBC that “every single time you give to the campaign, we’re going straight to talk to voters…We are not spending money on legal bills or hawking gold sneakers,” a reference to Trump.
A deputy campaign manager for Biden called a recent glitzy fundraiser for Trump “a handful of billionaires figuring out how to pay his legal bills.”
Asked about Biden’s use of the DNC to pay his legal bills, DNC spokesperson Alex Floyd told Axios: “There is no comparison — the DNC does not spend a single penny of grassroots donors’ money on legal bills — unlike Donald Trump, who actively solicits legal fees from his supporters and has drawn down every bank account he can get his hands on, like a personal piggy bank.”
Click here for more the Axios scoop
