The Democratic National Committee forked over donor cash to pay President Joe Biden’s legal bills related to special counsel Robert Hur’s classified documents investigation, even though party members have complained that the Republican National Committee is covering some of former President Donald Trump’s mounting legal tab.
According to Axios, which was the first to report the hypocrisy, “Biden used campaign donations to help pay his legal bills last year during the special counsel’s probe into his handling of classified documents,” two sources confirmed to the outlet.
“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 outlet noted further.
The DNC, which has collected the largest donations for Biden’s re-election campaign, paid over $1.5 million to lawyers or law firms representing Biden during the investigation, according to the committee’s financial reports.
The outlet added:
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- In January 2023, special counsel Robert Hur began investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents after papers from Biden’s vice presidency were found at his office and home.
- From July 2023 to February 2024, the DNC paid $1.05 million to Bob Bauer PLLC — the professional limited liability company for Biden’s lead attorney, Bob Bauer.
- Those payments were largely for handling the special counsel probe, including bringing on veteran lawyer David Laufman. He’s a former Justice Department official who previously oversaw the politically fraught probes into Hillary Clinton’s email server and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign and its surrogates have been attacking the RNC for paying some of Trump’s legal bills.
Biden’s campaign’s finance chair said on MSNBC last weekend 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.
