As the Biden campaign has been attacking President Trump for spending campaign funds on legal fees, a new report indicates President Biden was using funds similarly, despite promising not to. Mr. Biden, through the Democratic National Committee, used campaign money to help pay legal bills during a year-long probe by Special Counsel Robert Hur into Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents. Citing two people familiar with the matter and a review of campaign records, Axios reported on Friday that the DNC paid more than $1.5 million to lawyers representing Mr. Biden, including $1.05 million to Mr. Biden’s attorney, Bob Bauer, who is married to his senior adviser, Anita Dunn. Since July, the DNC has also been sending monthly payments of $100,000 to a firm that employs the lawyer that Mr. Hur’s report calls the president’s “personal counsel,” Jennifer Miller. The campaign fund usage is in stark contrast to claims made by top Biden officials. “Every single dime that you give to the Biden-Harris re-election campaign, we spend talking to voters,” the Biden campaign’s finance chairman, Rufus Gifford, said in an interview on MSNBC, adding that “we are not spending money on legal bills.” Mr. Gifford also doubled down later in the interview, saying that “the money that we are raising we are going straight to talking to voters.” Other top campaign officials for Mr. Biden have criticized Mr. Trump for “hosting a bunch of fat-cat billionaires hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, plotting how to pay his legal bills and buy political favor.”A recent New York Times report following a review of federal records indicated that Mr. Trump has spent more than $100 million in campaign funds on legal fees as he faces a myriad of legal challenges. Mr. Hur’s report into Mr. Biden, released in February, “uncovered evidence the president willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” and said his actions presented “serious risks to national security.” Mr. Biden was keeping documents concerning foreign affairs in his garage at his Delaware home, at his Washington, D.C., office, and at the Penn Biden Center at Philadelphia, as the Sun reported. Only unlike Special Counsel Jack Smith, who’s charged Mr. Trump with multiple felonies for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Hur declined to prosecute Mr. Biden, arguing that a jury would likely view him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who couldn’t remember when he was vice president or when his elder son, Beau, died of cancer. Mr. Hur’s scathing description of the president’s limited mental cognition caused a political firestorm for Mr. Biden, who angrily rebutted the characterization during a press conference in which he mixed up the presidents of Mexico and Egypt.“You think I would f—— forget the day my son died?” the president said.When asked by Axios about the campaign fund usage, the DNC said it was “no comparison” to Mr. Trump’s use of funds, with a a spokesman for the committee, Alex Floyd, saying the group “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.”
