A report released Friday shows President Joe Biden used campaign donations from the Democratic National Committee to pay for his legal defense during Special Counsel Robert Hur’s probe into his handling of classified documents.
The DNC paid various lawyers and law firms more than $1.5 million to defend Biden in Hur’s investigation, Axios reported.
About 70 percent of the DNC’s expenses in Biden’s case—$1.05 million—were paid between July 2023 and February 2024 to Biden’s lead attorney Bob Bauer and his company Bob Bauer PLLC, the outlet reported. The special counsel had started investigating Biden in January 2023 following the discovery of classified documents from Biden’s vice presidency at his office and home.
The Axios report came after the Biden campaign repeatedly attacked former president Donald Trump for using campaign funds in his legal defense. Biden’s deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty earlier this month called a recent fundraiser for Trump “a handful of billionaires figuring out how to pay his legal bills.”
The Biden campaign’s finance chair Rufus Gifford last week said on MSNBC that unlike Trump, Biden is “not spending money on legal bills or hawking gold sneakers,” claiming that “every single time you give to the campaign, we’re going straight to talk to voters, with 100 offices open in swing states, hundreds of thousands of calls to voters.”
The DNC declined to disclose how much money it had spent on behalf of Biden in Hur’s probe, with its spokesman Alex Floyd denying the committee used donations from Democratic voters to pay off Biden’s legal fees.
“There is no comparison—the DNC does not spend a single penny of grassroots donors’ money on legal bills—unlike Donald Trump, who actively solicits legal fees from his supporters and has drawn down every bank account he can get his hands on, like a personal piggy bank,” the DNC spokesman said.
