Joe Biden used $2 million from donors towards his legal fees despite publicly attacking Donald Trump for doing the same.

According to Federal Election Commission records, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) paid around $1.05 million (£840,000) to Bob Bauer, Mr Biden’s personal lawyer, who formed part of his legal team during the investigation into his handling of classified documents. A further $905,000 was paid to Boston legal firm, Hemenway & Barnes, which had been retained for the documents case.

The disclosure was seized upon by Republicans who accused the president and the Democrats of hypocrisy.

“If these corrupt Democrats didn’t have HYPOCRISY, they’d have NOTHING!” the Republican National Committee said.

Last week the Biden campaign said his fundraising was in “stark contrast to Trump’s cash-strapped operation that is funnelling the limited and billionaire-reliant funds it has to pay off his various legal fees”.

Rufus Gifford, the Biden campaign chairman, said: “Every single time you give to the campaign, we’re going straight to talk to voters, with 100 offices open in swing states, hundreds of thousands of calls to voters. We are not spending money on legal bills or hawking gold sneakers.”

Donald Trump in Georgia in March 2024 – Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Payments to Mr Biden’s lawyers started in January 2023 when the classified documents investigation began.

The cash came from the DNC’s legal account and the sum was about the same spent by the organisation during the Obama campaign.

But Democrat spokesman Alex Floyd said: “There is no comparison. The DNC does not spend a single penny of grassroots donors’ money on legal bills, unlike Donald Trump, who actively solicits legal fees from his supporters and has drawn down every bank account he can get his hands on like a personal piggy bank.”

However Christopher Galdieri, professor of politics at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, told The Telegraph.“It makes it tougher for Biden to criticise Trump.

“One difference is the practical implication. As far as we know, this donation was a one-time thing.

“Trump has turned the Republican National Committee as the fundraising arm of his criminal defence team.”

According to The New York Times, Mr Trump has already paid $100 million to lawyers amid his legal woes.

This does not take into account the damages awarded to E Jean Carroll after he was found liable for defaming the journalist who had accused him of raping her decades ago.

Nor does it include the bond demanded by the courts after he lost a civil fraud case in New York.

Barrage of court cases

The former president has used the barrage of court cases to raise money from supporters, insisting that the prosecutions are politically driven.

In his final report on Mr Biden’s handling of classified documents, special counsel Robert Hur found that Mr Biden had wilfully retained documents. Papers relating to Afghanistan were found in the cluttered garage of his home in Delaware.

But Mr Hur decided against prosecuting Mr Biden who, he said, would present himself at a trial as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

Mr Bauer, who also worked for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2009, led Mr Biden’s attack on the Hur report questioning the president’s cognitive abilities.

He and White House counsel Richard Sauber lashed out at the findings in a five-page letter.

“We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate,” they wrote. “The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events.”