A supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory whom the Trump campaign distanced itself from in 2020. A real-estate developer and Trump megadonor. A funeral home company.
Those were among the top contributors to a legal-defense fund established by allies of Donald J. Trump to help pay the mounting legal bills of people connected to the various investigations into the former president. The fund is not intended for Mr. Trump’s own bills.
The fund, the Patriot Legal Defense Fund Inc., raised a total of $1,624,360 from July through early December, according to documents the group filed with the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday. The group made another filing on Wednesday that showed zero contributions and expenditures. It was unclear why.
The biggest donation in the I.R.S. documents filed Tuesday — $1 million — was from the Caryn L Hildenbrand Living Trust. Ms. Hildenbrand is also known as Caryn Borland. She and her husband, Michael, gave more than $1 million in campaign-related contributions to Mr. Trump’s re-election effort in 2020. Their sharing of memes and social media posts about the QAnon conspiracy theory led Mike Pence, then the vice president, to cancel a fund-raiser with them. Efforts to reach the couple were unsuccessful.
The conspiracy theory, embraced by a segment of Mr. Trump’s supporters, involves false claims that top Democrats are Satan-worshiping pedophiles and that the former president was recruited to break up the global pedophile cabal. Mr. Trump has increasingly nodded to the movement and its memes in his social media posts.
The filing on Tuesday listed just 21 contributors, with one donation as low as $60. One donation of $34,000 was from the Cleveland Funeral Home Inc. Another was from Robert Zarnegin, a wealthy real-estate developer in California who has been a frequent donor to Mr. Trump.
Michael Glassner, a longtime political aide to Mr. Trump who is leading the effort, said the group had been “gratified at the early support” it had received. He said the criminal cases against Mr. Trump from the Justice Department, which he insisted were politically weaponized, had “required many innocent supporters of President Trump to require attorneys, and the Legal Defense Fund is able to assist them with these costs.”
Kenny Williams, who co-owns the Cleveland funeral home that made the $34,000 donation, said via text message that his associate had a personal relationship with Mr. Trump, but he declined to answer additional questions about that associate. “We still stand behind him!” he wrote of Mr. Trump. “He is a man of his word.”
None of the money has so far been allocated to people with legal bills, according to the filing. The largest expense paid by the defense fund was $18,136 to Mr. Trump’s members-only club and residence, Mar-a-Lago. The Florida club hosted a dinner for the defense fund on Nov. 29 that Mr. Trump attended.
Most of the money raised appears to have been in connection with that event.
Another Trump-aligned group, a political action committee called Save America, has burned through tens of millions of dollars to help pay legal fees for the former president and a number of people connected to the web of investigations and court cases he is facing. By the middle of this year, the last time the group was required to file with the Federal Election Commission, Save America had spent more than $20 million in legal fees.
The amount was so large that Save America, after sending $60 million to a different outside group supporting Mr. Trump’s campaign, requested a refund. Save America has been steadily getting money sent back to it from that other outside group, the super PAC called MAGA Inc., according to two people familiar with the matter.
The crush of legal bills, which has grown as Mr. Trump has prepared for four possible trials in four different jurisdictions after being charged with 91 felony counts, has been a source of strain within the former president’s orbit. That’s especially the case because Mr. Trump does not like spending his own money on lawyers.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
