A churl of great price
By 
The Daily Beast has committed some factual reporting against the former DOPUS. No Habermanesque levels of access for them.
DB provides a detailed look at the money he’s draining from donors to pay his attorneys. But the article starts with a tangential expense.
In the last six months of 2023, Trump’s Save America PAC paid $238,100 to CTS Research, a private investigation firm in Brooklyn staffed by two former cops from the New York Police Department, former NYPD captain Sean Crowley and undercover cop Craig Taylor. The firm had previously received $152,285 from Save America earlier in the year, as CBS reported in August.
What’s been unknown until now is what exactly Crowley and Craig’s firm was snooping around on. According to the person familiar with the matter, the private detective discovered that an early iteration of Trump’s legal team failed to interview several witnesses in the Carroll case—something that should have been a basic step in defending the former president. But the private investigator expense is an extraordinarily unusual one to place on a PAC.
I hope the attorneys in the audience chime in here. Do clients normally have someone investigate their attorneys after they retain the attorney?
At this point, it’s clear prosecutors aren’t the only ones causing Trump’s legal headaches; his own lawyers, and his suspicions of ineptitude, seem to be in his head too.
Given all of the other people who live rent-free in his noggin, it must be crowded. But I’m not surprised he suspects his current attorneys are inept. He’s burned through many of the nept ones.
Save America alone spent $24.8 million on lawyers and lawsuits in the second half of 2023, according to the latest FEC filing released this week. But many of the 166 line items were logged for cases that aren’t remotely related to the official job he did at the White House or his current run for president.
Some of that money will pay for the two legal beatings he received courtesy of E. Jean Carroll. Also, he’s still trying to sue H. Clinton. Even though a previous suit triggered a sanction of nearly $1 million.
But Trump just can’t let go of the case. In the latter half of last year, Save America spent $134,850 on Richard Klugh, the Florida attorney handling an appeal of the federal judge’s scathing order. Another $191,000 went to Jesse Binnall, a separate lawyer who is helping revive that vengeance crusade and is also defending Trump from a host of lawsuits seeking to hold him accountable for the Jan. 6 insurrection.
A quick glance at Binnall’s career indicates he likes to defend white supremacist filth by yelling about Free Speech (sounds familiar). And he’s an election denier. I really hope that Judge Middlebrooks, who issued the sanction, gets this case too. So Middlebrooks can squish him into paste and display the remains in a jar as a warning.
You can read the details at the link. A number of attorneys maximized their profits and minimized their exposure to sanctions. In other words, they had the sense to take their money and split.
