New campaign finance documents show that Donald Trump’s political action committee paid the law firm that represented the former president’s senior adviser Boris Epshteyn ahead of his upcoming criminal trial in Arizona.
The leadership PAC, Save America, made two payments of $40,000 and $10,000 on May 14 to the Phoenix-based law firm Tully Bailey LLP. Named partner Michael Bailey, who served as U.S. attorney for Arizona from 2019 to 2021, has been representing Epshteyn in the Arizona case since at least May 9, according to court records.
Epshteyn was among those indicted in April on state charges that he helped orchestrate an alleged fake elector scheme in Arizona to send Trump’s electors to the U.S. Capitol to be counted instead of Joe Biden’s electors after the 2020 election. He has pleaded not guilty.
Bailey, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, represented Epshteyn at his June 18 arraignment. The arraignment was postponed with the court’s permission and with the prosecutors’ agreement, due to Bailey’s own commitments to another client out of state.
It is unclear whether the payment to the company was directly related to Epshteyn’s representation, but the payments were the PAC’s first disbursements to the company.
As of last year, it appears that none of the 30 other co-defendants with ties to Trump in Arizona or a related scheme in Georgia have received direct funding from Save America for their legal fees.
Epshteyn remains a frequent presence on the campaign trail for Trump, leading the coordination of the various legal teams that advised Trump on his New York hush-money trial and three other ongoing criminal cases, as well as the investigation by the now-defunct House Jan. 6 committee.
Save America, which Trump founded in November 2020, and Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign have spent at least $90.6 million on legal fees, mostly on his behalf. Federal Election Commission filings dating back to 2021 show that nearly $83 million of that amount is attributable to Save America.
The PAC has made payments for “legal advice” to law firms representing Trump’s co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira in the Mar-a-Lago documents case in Florida. However, no Trump-affiliated political entities are believed to have paid lawyers representing defendants other than Trump himself and Epshteyn in Arizona or Georgia. Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis’s election interference case against Trump and more than a dozen co-defendants has largely stalled pending an appeal over her continued involvement in the case.
Asked whether Save America covered legal fees for other co-defendants in Georgia or Arizona, the organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, also did not respond.
In a statement Tuesday night, Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said: “Trump will do everything he can to maintain his grip on power, including paying bills for fake voters who attempted to steal an election.”
In December 2022, Save America paid nearly $900,000 to McGuireWoods LLP, which represented former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the Jan. 6 congressional investigation and other ongoing cases.
In 2021 and 2022, as the Jan. 6 committee sent subpoenas to a web of people close to Trump in the weeks surrounding the Capitol attack, Save America paid about $175,000 to the law firm of attorney Stanley Woodward. Woodward represented a number of Trump’s personal aides during the investigation, including Nauta, Will Russell and Dan Scavino. He has also represented Nauta in the Mar-a-Lago documents case since the investigation began.
CORRECTION (July 2, 2024, 9:38 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misstated Save America’s payouts to law firms representing Trump’s co-defendants in Florida. The PAC has made payments to such firms this year; late 2023 was not the last time payouts were made.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
