'Lot of funny business': MSNBC expert questions Trump's campaign cash shuffle
During a "Morning Joe" segment on how much money the Republican and Democratic parties have raked in as they head towards the November general election, MSNBC Economic Analyst Steve Rattner devoted some time to Donald Trump's bleeding massive amounts cash from his campaign to pay for his legal problems and suggested it needs investigation.
Standing before graphics showing the disparity in cash, with Democrats taking a commanding lead, Rattner then turned to the former president's cash transfers from affiliated PAC's that are paying for his criminal cases in four jurisdictions as well as the civil suits he is facing including the recent $83.3 million defamation trial he lost to writer E. Jean Carroll.
"He's also spending a lot on his legal fees from his fundraising," Rattner told host Mika Brzezinski. "Last year, he took $55 million of money his donors gave him and used it on his legal fees, it may well have been all his legal costs for what we know. In the second half of the year, he took $29 million."
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Pointing to the PACs illustrated on his graphics, he continued, "I don't know whether they'd [donors] be surprised to know that 60 percent of all the money they gave to this [MAGA, Inc.] PAC went to Trump's legal fees. It was funneled around here and ended up in legal fees. I don't know people who contributed, even a lot of the small-dollar contributions you saw over there, would know that 10% percent of their money went to pay Trump's legal fees."
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"Steve," host Brzezinski interrupted. "I think I'm going to sound really naïve here again, but is that allowed? Is it unprecedented? But these are, what 91 counts federal indictments, civil cases he's been found liable? Is this just not a random court battle or something that has nothing to do with the state of our democracy? Do these people know they are paying his legal fees?"
"If they don't know, hopefully they do now," Rattner replied. "But there has been some notice of it. Look, I assume it's maybe legal, no one has said that it isn't."
Pointing to his graphic, he continued, "This whole thing, by the way of course, is a lot of loopholes and a lot of funny business that goes on in terms of people giving more than they really want you to but being able to funnel it through these PACs and back into the campaign and so forth."
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"And it is unprecedented in my experience. I have never heard of anyone taking legal fees of this magnitude to pay what are, in effect, personal fees," he added.
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