(PresidentialHill.com)- Filings with the Federal Election Commission show that political committees that are controlled by former President Donald Trump had contributed in excess of $2 million to various law firms that have represented witnesses who have testified for the House’s special panel investigating the insurrection on January 6, 2021.
Top recipients of the financial support were law firms that were connected to Stefan Passantino, the former lawyer for the White House. Those firms once represented Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, who gave a bombshell testimony regarding Trump’s activities on the day of January 6.
Those firms received $1.6 million just this year from PACs connected to Trump.
These donations were first reported by CNN. In their report, they brought up the question of whether Trump was trying to use some of his massive amount of donor funds to try to support lawyers who would eventually try to persuade witnesses to not cooperate with the House panel’s investigation.
While Hutchinson was represented by Passantino at one point in time, she decided to cooperate more with the panel — eventually providing the key testimony in the case — only after she decided to part ways with his firm.
Maryland Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, who is a member of the House’s investigating panel, said of Hutchinson recently:
“She’s an important example of one who decided to get a new lawyer and then to come back and testify, and obviously, if there are witnesses out there who believe that their lawyer is working at cross purposes with their obligation to tell the truth, they should work to rectify it.”
At this point, it’s not clearly whether the financial support that the PACs gave to the law firms were used to help represent any witnesses in the January 6 investigation, or whether they were used for some other purpose.
Some of the other recipients include JPRowley Law, a firm that represented Peter Navarro, a former adviser for the White House; and also Abel Bean Law, a firm that has represented Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Trump.
In addition to the actual events on January 6, 2021, and the events that led up to that day, the House’s investigating panel has been looking critically at the fundraising habits and methods that Trump’s PACs have been taking since the 2020 presidential election ended.
Combined, Trump’s Make American Great Again PAC and Save America PAC have raised $120 million from their donors just during this 2022 election cycle.
As California Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren, who’s also serving on the House’s investigating committee, explained:
“Some of that money is being used to pay for lawyers for witnesses. And it’s not clear that that arrangement is one that is without coercion potential for some of those witnesses.”
Simply identifying that Trump-backed PACs are supporting law firms that represent January 6 witnesses is one thing. Proving that the funds were given for anything malicious, though, is something entirely different.
