A senior advisor to the Trump campaign and a longtime Trump family confidante told RedState media reports about President Donald J. Trump and the Patriot Legal Defense Fund abandoning his staffers and allies to fund their legal expenses are inaccurate.

“What we're doing is covering the cost of legal bills for aides and advisors and employees that are being erroneously targeted, obviously in the quest to indict and convict President Trump,” said Lynne Patton, who is part of the team running the fund, along with Eric Trump, Donald J. Trump Jr., and Trump political advisor Michael Glassner.

Patton, who also served in the Trump administration, said she spoke to Trump about how to set up the fund. 

“The first thing he said to me was: ‘Lynne, don't you think it's kind of tacky for me to raise money for my own legal bills considering the fact that I have billions of dollars and most of the people who would donate to me are making far less than that?’” she said.

The University of Miami graduate said she told the president he was right.

“I said: ‘You do have a point there, sir. You are not wrong, but you have to understand that the American people recognize what they're trying to do,” she said. “They know that in order for us to have an effective campaign, your legal bills need to be covered.”

She said the universe of people paid from the fund goes beyond defendants.

“We're going to be covering the legal expenses of witnesses and folks who we're going to subpoena to have evidence of Trump's innocence,” Patton said.

The fund looks to play both defense and offense by supporting investigators and other trial support necessary to counter what the taxpayer-funded prosecutors are mounting against them, she said. 

“Now it's our time to subpoena people, it's our time to collect evidence, it's our time to engage in discovery,” she said. 

The American people understand that the Justice Department, the New York State attorney general, and the district attorneys Alvin Bragg in Manhattan and Fani Willis in Fulton County have had up to two years to prepare their case while Trump and his staffers and allies waited to see what was coming at them, Patton said. 

Meanwhile, the prosecutors expect Trump and the others to be ready in three months, said the former senior staffer to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson.

“It's outrageous. It's obviously a violation of the Sixth Amendment, which is a right to an effective counsel,” she said. “We want to help them prevent their lives from being completely destroyed by ensuring they have representation against unlawful harassment.”

Patton said because some people are co-defendants or potential witnesses in trials involving Trump, the fund has to be careful not to get accused of witness tampering inadvertently.

“I'm no lawyer, but I think the difference this time is that Trump is a co-defendant in this case, and it’s also a criminal case,” she said. “There are certain restrictions when it comes to covering the cost of co-defendants.”

The plan is to help everyone they can, she said. “What I can say is that we will cover the expenses and legal costs for those people who we can.”

Russian Collusion Hoax cost Trump super PAC $20 million in legal fees

Patton said the fund also draws on the lessons learned from the Russian Collusion Hoax and the legal bills that crushed innocent Americans caught up in it.

“The Russian Collusion Hoax took up three years of Trump's administration,” she said.

“It distracted him to the point where they wanted to ensure his administration was not successful with respect to the policies and obviously the hiring he wanted to do,” she said. 

“What we really learned was that it was designed to bankrupt his reelection campaign,” she said.

“What a lot of people don't know is that even though the Russian Collusion Hoax has now been proven to have been completely made up, it still cost the super PAC over $20 million,” Patton said. 

“Obviously, it could have gone toward the reelection of President Trump in 2020, and so we're making sure that we're not put in that similar position again with the creation of the Patriot Legal Defense Fund,” she said. 

“We believe that everybody has a right to an effective counsel, and we know that they are targeting innocent people who work for this man in an attempt to intimidate them and drive them into financial ruin,” she said.

“Every single registered Republican, and quite frankly, every single American, should be outraged by what we're witnessing in this day and age,” she said. 

“It's truly a preemptive election interference with the 2024 election,” Patton said.

“That is something that, up until now, we've only witnessed in third-world authoritarian countries.”