Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
The controversial financial vehicle that President Donald Trump used to pay his aides’ and allies’ legal bills has refused to provide key details about the disbursement of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But with the Mueller saga in the rear-view mirror, some of those details are now coming into focus.
The Patriot Legal Expense Fund Trust, as the legal defense fund was dubbed, shelled out nearly half a million dollars to some of Washington’s top white-shoe law firms. The group was not required to disclose whose legal bills it was actually paying. But personal financial-disclosure filings first reported by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reveal the legal defense fund paid legal bills for senior White House policy aide Stephen Miller, social media director Dan Scavino, and Avi Berkowitz, a top aide to Jared Kushner.
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Information gleaned from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report also appears to solve one enduring mystery of the legal defense fund. In a footnote buried on page 169, the report refers to a piece of evidence marked with the title “AKIN_GUMP_BERKOWITZ.” Who exactly the law firm Akin Gump was representing in the matter had not been previously reported and both the legal expense fund and the law firm had refused to say.
But in his most recent personal financial disclosure form, Berkowitz reported receiving about $109,000 in legal services from the fund last year. And in September, the fund reported paying slightly more than that—about $114,000—to Akin Gump, the single largest recipient of any of the fund’s legal consulting payments.
It appears that Akin Gump was also representing Scavino. The difference between the value of services the firm provided to Berkowitz and the amount the fund reported paying the firm was $5,018.29, almost exactly the value of legal services that Scavino reported receiving from the fund last year.
Miller’s disclosure filing clarifies another of the fund’s murky data points. He reported benefitting from precisely $40,000 in legal expenses covered by fund, the exact sum that it reported paying to the firm King & Spalding last year.
Based on public reporting on the various attorneys that represented Trumpworld figures throughout the Mueller affair, we also know that two more of the firms that the legal defense fund reported paying, Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky & Popeo PC and Schertler & Oronato LLP, represented former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former Trump security chief Keith Schiller, respectively. Another firm, Jones Day, has done extensive legal work for the Trump campaign itself, which might explain the legal defense fund’s payments to that firm.
That leaves two law firms that received payments from the legal defense fund, Berliner Corcoran & Rowe LLP and the Aegis Law Group, whose actual beneficiaries we still don’t know. And it’s not clear that we ever will; under current law, the fund is not required to disclose whose legal bills it’s actually paying.
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