New York Times correspondent, best-selling author, and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman recently shared a scoop about ex-President Donald Trump’s criminal defense and a $60 million refund from a super PAC, confirming and expanding on reporting from The Washington Post.
News broke Thursday afternoon that Special Counsel Jack Smith has filed three additional charges against Trump: one additional count of unlawful retention of National Defense Information and two new obstruction counts based on allegations that Trump and co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira attempted to delete surveillance video footage at The Mar-a-Lago Club in the summer of 2022.
It has been noted on Saturday, a report from Haberman and Shane Goldmacher confirmed and fleshed out details of a story first reported by WaPo about the $40 million Trump’s Save America PAC spent on Trump’s criminal defense this year, and the $60 million refund that spending prompted the PAC to make to another Trump PAC.
Haberman’s report contains this entirely predictable but still hilarious line:
It is unclear how much money was refunded.
Haberman and Goldmacher continue:
“But the refund was sought as the political action committee, Save America, spent more than $40 million in legal fees incurred by Mr. Trump and witnesses in various legal cases related to him this year alone, according to another person familiar with the matter.
That $40 million was in addition to $16 million that Save America spent in the previous two years on legal fees. Since then, Mr. Trump has been indicted twice and has expanded the size of his legal team, and his two co-defendants in the case related to his retention of classified material work for him. The total legal spending is roughly $56 million.”
Trump faces a raft of other investigations and indictments and potential indictments and charges and verdicts — the Special Counsel Jack Smith-led Justice Department probes into Trump’s conduct surrounding the January 6 insurrection, as well as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ grand jury investigation of his effort to overturn election results in Georgia and New York Attorney General Letitia James’s civil case against Trump and his company, and the trial over an indictment on 34 felony counts for crimes involving hush money payments to adult entertainment entrepreneur Stormy Daniels and others.
