Trump “election defense fund” was actually massive fundraising scam
By 
Please try to contain your shock and amazement:
Former President Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party entered this year having stockpiled more than $175 million from fund-raising in November and December based on his false claims of voter fraud, spending only a tiny fraction on lawyers and bills for his effort to overturn the presidential election, according to new campaign finance reports filed on Sunday night.
The picture that emerges in the new Federal Election Commission reportsis of Mr. Trump mounting a furious public relations effort to spread the lie and keep generating money from it, rather than making a sustained legal push to try to support his conspiracy theories.
His campaign’s single biggest expense in December was a nearly $5 million media buy paid to the firm that bought his television advertisements. His second-largest payment, $4.4 million, was for online advertising. And the Republican National Committee pocketed millions of dollars in donations — collecting 25 cents for every dollar Mr. Trump raised online — in the final weeks of the year as it spent relatively little on legal costs.
All told, Mr. Trump’s campaign spent only $10 million on legal costs — about one-fifth of what it spent on advertising and fund-raising, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings from Nov. 4 through the end of the year.
And props to the NYT editors who are letting their reporters call Trump’s lies “lies.”
Baby steps.