The Daily Beast reveals a legal defense fund supposedly set up to help Trump campaign officials and allies caught up in the Russia investigation with legal expenses has not paid out any money for legal services so far.
The Patriot Legal Expense Fund Trust has, however, taken in donations from big Republican funders with real estate, casino, and energy sector interests.
Through June, the group’s top donor was Geoff Palmer, a Los Angeles real estate developer and one of the Trump 2016 campaign’s biggest financial supporters, according to financial records obtained by The Daily Beast. Palmer is followed by Phil Ruffin, a casino magnate and Trump backer, and Continental Resources, the oil and gas company founded and chaired by Harold Hamm, a high-dollar Trump donor and board member of pro-Trump dark money group America First Policies.
The group also reported income from ProActive Communications, which is run by the legal expense fund’s spokesman, Mark Serrano. ProActive has also done extensive business for the Trump re-election campaign since last year and Serrano has been a public defender of the president on cable.
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But despite the large contributions to the group, totalling more than $200,000 through June, it did not report spending any money on legal services. Its only itemized expenditures went to the accounting firm CliftonLarsonAllen and to Petra RMS, a risk management firm that the group reported paying for “insurance” services.
The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have picked up the tab for many of the legal expenses incurred by the president and his team.
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The Patriot Legal Expense Fund Trust was incorporated as an LLC, but operates as a political action committee (PAC), which requires the group to file quarterly financial reports with the IRS. But the IRS has no record of those filings for either the first or second quarters on its website.
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Serrano said the group filed both disclosures with the IRS on time, and that he has “no idea” why the agency has not made either filing publicly available on its website.
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The structure of the PAC also raised red flags for some ethicists when the legal expense fund was formed in February. The political action committee structure “represents a radical and dangerous departure from established practice for government-employee legal defense funds,” wrote Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), in a column for the Los Angeles Times. “This is unprecedented in my experience — legal defense funds are not also campaign fundraising tools.”
OGE nevertheless blessed the group’s structure, provided the fund does not use money from any donor to pay for the legal expenses of federal officials who oversee that donor’s business activity.
But because of the group’s structure, and lack of activity so far, that can be difficult to determine, according to Public Citizen’s government affairs lobbyist, Craig Holman. Because the fund can theoretically support multiple Trump administration officials, there’s no way of definitively determining whether money from one donor is supporting one particular beneficiary.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Democrats went back to the OGE in April and asked for more information about the fund. The OGE responded 10 days later and explained that while it does not "approve or disapprove of specific legal defense funds," it reviewed a draft of the Patriot Legal Expense Fund's terms for ethics compliance and advised that the Fund followed those terms, it would not be in violation of ethics or standards rules.
Some Big Names in Republican Fundraising Are Financing Trump’s Legal Defense Fund (The Daily Beast)