COMMITTEE SCRUTINIZES TRUMP FUNDRAISING TACTICS
Investigators say ‘election defense fund’ misled donors
Since Election Day in 2020, Donald Trump and his close allies have raised more than $390 million through aggressive fundraising solicitations promising bold political actions, including fighting to overturn his reelection campaign defeat, helping allied candidates win their own campaigns and fighting “to save America from Joe Biden and the radical left.”
In reality, though, campaign finance filings show that much of the money spent by political committees affiliated with Trump went toward paying off his 2020 campaign expenses and bolstering his political operation in anticipation of an expected 2024 presidential run. As of a few months ago, $144 million remained in the bank.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is suggesting that there might be criminal exposure in one particular strain of Trump’s misleading fundraising appeals — those urging his supporters to donate to efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
In a hearing Monday, the panel highlighted fundraising solicitations sent by
Trump’s campaign committees after the election, seeking donations for an “Official Election Defense Fund” that the Trump team claimed would be used to fight against alleged vote fraud.
“The select committee discovered no such fund existed,” a committee investigator said in a video shown at the hearing. It cast the fund as a marketing gimmick being used to bilk Trump’s supporters.
It was an especially cynical endeavor, according to the committee, because Trump and his allies knew his claims of a stolen election were false. Yet they continued using fundraising appeals to spread that falsehood, and to raise money that the committee suggested was paid to Trump’s business and groups run by his allies.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, who led the committee’s presentation on Trump’s fundraising, suggested that his allies continued their futile legal challenges to the election because they needed to justify their fundraising.
After the hearing, she suggested that the Justice Department should assess whether it was a crime for Trump to have “intentionally misled his donors, asked them to donate to a fund that didn’t exist and used the money raised for something other than what he said.”
Campaign finance experts expressed mixed opinions about the prospects of any potential prosecution.
While misleading fundraising claims are something of a staple of modern politics, the Justice Department in recent years has charged a number of operators of so-called scam PACs — political committees that raise money mostly to pay the consultants operating them. Those groups were typically not associated with candidates, let alone a former president.
The experts said that any investigation of Trump’s fundraising would likely target his aides, not the former president.
And they pointed out that the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, the campaign committee that sent out most of the solicitations for the election defense fund, transferred funds to the Republican National Committee, which spent money on legal fights related to the 2020 election.
“In contrast with some of these other scam PAC prosecutions — where effectively none of the money raised went toward satisfying donor intent — Trump might argue that a portion of the funds raised in the postelection period went toward litigation, and an additional portion went toward future ‘election integrity’ efforts,” said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance expert at watchdog group Documented.