CNN’s Maggie Haberman and Kaitlan Collins Roast Trump Over Stunning Legal Fees Scoop: ‘Astounding — Eye-Popping’

New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman and CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins roasted former President Donald Trump over the blockbuster scoop about political donors paying tens of millions of Trump’s legal fees, noting he’s not someone who likes to pay his own bills.

Haberman and Shane Goldmacher reported Tuesday that Trump “has been directing 10 percent of donations raised online to Save America, meaning 10 cents of every dollar he has received from supporters is going to a PAC that chiefly funds his lawyers.”

The duo estimated that Trump donors funded Trump’s legal cases to the tune of about $50 million in 2023.

On Tuesday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Collins marveled at the “astounding” figure. and she and Haberman took turns noting — without using words like “deadbeat” — that Trump has a history of not liking to pay his legal bills:

COLLINS: I mean, $50 million, for someone, who obviously has a lot of legal troubles, is still a really astounding number.

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: It’s an eye-popping number. It is eye-popping in a couple of ways. Number one, he is not somebody, who historically has liked paying legal bills.

COLLINS: That was my first thought.

HABERMAN: Yes.

COLLINS: He hates paying his attorneys.

HABERMAN: Right. Well, this isn’t his money. This is donor money. And so, it’s a lot easier to pay, when you’re paying with donor money, number one.

But number two, this is, it’s a lot of money. It’s not just him. It’s also lawyers, for witnesses, as you know. It’s lawyers for, I think, his two co-defendants, at least one of them. People who are not — one of whom is on the campaign roll, the other is worked for Mar-a-Lago. These numbers are not going to get smaller, as we go forward, because he has been indicted four times, and this number got exponentially higher, last year than it was in 2022. And if any case goes to trial, this year, it is going to go even higher. And so, how much he is going to be able to continue to pay, out of Save America, and another committee that he’s been using, MAGA PAC, remains to be seen.

COLLINS: But, I mean, he still has money coming in. The — Robert Bigelow, who’s a billionaire of the hotel chain, the Budget Suites, he said today, he gave Trump a million dollars, towards his legal fees, and that he’s made a promise to give him $20 million more, to the Super PAC.

HABERMAN: Yes.

COLLINS: But do the actual donors, the real people know that their money is going to this?

HABERMAN: Let me just — let me just pick that apart, the first thing that you talked about with Robert Bigelow, number one. I tried to track that down.

As far as I know, he didn’t give money to the legal defense fund that Trump folks set up. That doesn’t benefit Trump directly. That benefits everybody else. He can’t give a million dollars to Save America, because it’s capped, in terms of how much you can give to Save America. So, unless he literally handed Donald Trump, a personal million-dollar check, I don’t know what that is.

In terms of the small-dollar donors, who — remember, this Political Action Committee was seeded with money that Donald Trump started raising, after he lost the 2020 election, on his false claims of widespread fraud. And then, money had to go somewhere. A bunch of it went here.

Did his donors know this is what they were going to be paying for? No. Would they all mind? I doubt it, because some of them thought they were paying for some kind of legal fight.

And I’m sure, in their mind, you know, the number of his supporters, who I talked to, in Iowa and New Hampshire, who described the legal cases against him, as illegitimate or something they didn’t believe in? I’m not sure they would care about that. But it is worth noting, it is not — it is not his money.

COLLINS: So, not only do they not care. They’re happy to do it.

HABERMAN: Some are.

Watch above via CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins.