The Trump campaign boosted its legal spending in advance of the Trump Jr. meeting news


President Trump's campaign, which is actively fundraising for 2020, spent $677,826 on "legal consulting" in April, May, and June of this year, new campaign finance disclosures revealed Saturday. That is a marked rise from the campaign's legal expenditures in the first quarter of 2017; for example, $538,265 of that figure went to the organization's primary law firm, Jones Day, which from January to March was paid $190,306, less than half the second quarter payment.
Also included in the total is $50,000 for Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer, paid two weeks before the revelation of Trump Jr.'s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer and a former Soviet counterintelligence officer in hopes of acquiring incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.
The Trump campaign proper plus two affiliated joint fundraising committees together raised $13.9 million for 2020 in the reported three-month period. The payments to attorneys are legal so long as the lawyers limit their attention to parts of the Russia collusion investigation pertaining to the campaign.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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