While President Trump so far is relatively insulated from the mounting legal bills that come with facing 91 separate charges in four different criminal cases, many of those who surrounded him and spoke up for him during and after the 2020 election and who are now caught in the same dragnets are not so lucky.Some of those accused by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, of conspiring to overturn that state’s election results more than two years ago have already turned to crowd-funding sites to raise money for their legal defenses. Others, like Mayor Giuliani, have reportedly begged Mr. Trump to help out, only to be rebuffed.Lawyers working for one of Mr. Trump’s former legal advisors, Jenna Ellis, have set up a fundraising campaign on the Christian-focused GiveSendGo site, seeking the public’s help to defray the costs associated with her indictment in the Georgia case. As of midday Thursday, the campaign had raised nearly $45,000 in small donations from about 700 people.“We will fight for Jenna,” she quoted her lawyer, Mike Melito, as saying in her first mention of the campaign on Twitter Tuesday. “If you would like to help support our efforts please consider donating by clicking the link below. America and the profession of law are worth the fight.”Supporters of Mr. Trump quickly tried to tamp down Ms. Ellis’s effort, suggesting that her support of his main adversary in the presidential race — Governor DeSantis — is grounds for exile from Trump World. “Do not fall for her lies,” one conservative influencer who is loyal to Mr. Trump, Lara Loomer, wrote. “Jenna Ellis hates Donald Trump and his supporters and she has already threatened to flip on him. Do NOT donate.”Another outspoken Trump supporter, Mr. Giuliani, reportedly flew to Mar-a-Lago with his lawyer in April to ask for help with his own mounting legal bills, said to total well into seven figures now, but was blanked by the former president. Mr. Trump is said to have agreed in principle to help the man who was the public face of the efforts to overturn the 2020 election but declined to provide any specifics as to how much and when he would provide that assistance.Lawyers representing Mr. Giuliani told a judge overseeing another case against him, a lawsuit by an election technology company, Smartmatic, which Mr. Giuliani accused of rigging votes in 2020, that the former mayor of New York’s bills have all but bankrupted him and he cannot afford the $20,000 in legal costs for discovery in that case. “These are a lot of bills that he’s not paying,” Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Adam Katz, told the judge in that case during a hearing Wednesday. “I think this is very humbling for Mr. Giuliani.”Last month, Mr. Giuliani put an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that he has owned for decades on the market for $6.5 million.Mr. Trump has long had a reputation for avoiding his legal fees and was even sued for nonpayment by his former in-house counsel, Michael Cohen. Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump skipped out on more than $1.3 million in legal fees for his work on behalf of the Trump Organization. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed sum just days before the case was due to go to trial.Several of the same attorneys now named as co-conspirators in Georgia, in fact, have alleged that Mr. Trump failed to pay their bills for working on his behalf in the aftermath of the 2020 election. CNBC reports, based on testimony to congressional investigators and statements provided to the Federal Elections Commission, that the bills from Mr. Giuliani and others went unpaid even though his campaign raised more than $250 million on the premise that the money was being used to fight the election results.Mr. Trump’s reluctance to pay his lawyers appears to have subsided since the legal troubles against him have mounted. The money raised in the aftermath of the 2020 election was funneled to a political action committee, the Save America PAC, that shelled out more than $27 million in legal fees to a small army of lawyers defending him in the first six months of 2023.A former official in the Trump administration, Michael Caputo, suggested that the legal expenses piling up for Mr. Giuliani, Ms. Ellis, and the others indicted in Georgia — everyone except for Mr. Trump — are just beginning. He said he had to spend $300,000 on legal fees related to testimony he gave on Capitol Hill related to the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 vote.“These 18 additional targets in the GA indictment are in for far more legal expenses,” Mr. Caputo said on the platform formerly known as Twitter. “They’ll lose their homes, pull their kids out of schools, delay medical care.”
