President Donald Trump. President Donald Trump speaks at the White House in November 2019. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

President Donald Trump's reelection campaign shelled out more than $500,000 on legal fees last month, spending half of that amount on a boutique law office suing media companies on his behalf and almost $200,000 on Jones Day, the firm of former White House counsel Donald McGahn.

Trump's campaign also directed a relatively meager sum, nearly $6,500, to Consovoy McCarthy, a firm that has defended the president in lawsuits seeking access to his financial records, according to a disclosure filed Wednesday. With that payment last month, the campaign's total spending on Consovoy McCarthy came to nearly $200,000 since October 2019.

The bulk of the campaign's April legal spending went to Harder LLP, a firm that has threatened and sued media companies.

Trump turned to the firm's name partner, Charles Harder, in March for a libel suit against CNN over an opinion piece that said the president's campaign had left open the possibility of seeking Russia's assistance in the 2020 election. Harder is involved in Trump suits against The New York Times and Washington Post for alleged libel, citing opinion pieces that linked Trump to Russia's interference in the 2016 election. In March, the Trump campaign paid Harder's firm more than $450,000, about half of its $900,000 in legal spending that month. Since 2018, the Trump campaign has paid Harder's firm more than $3 million, disclosures show.

Meanwhile, Trump's campaign money continued to flow to Jones Day, the law firm that has long advised the president in connection with his political ambitions. Since 2015, Trump's campaign has spent more than $11 million on the firm, which has fed numerous former partners into high-ranking posts in the administration and, in some cases, seats on the federal bench.

The dip in legal spending, from $900,000 in March to about $550,000 in April, coincided with a plummeting of campaign expenditures overall by Trump and his presumptive Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, as the coronavirus outbreak kept both of them off the trail. Trump's campaign spent $7.7 million and Biden's shelled out nearly $13 million, marking the lowest monthly outlays of the year.

Biden's campaign devoted almost $100,000 to legal services in April, with more than $85,000 spent on Covington & Burling. The campaign hired Covington partner Robert Lenhard, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, last year and has since paid the firm almost $1 million, according to a review of disclosures.

In 2008, the year he joined Covington, Lenhard oversaw the Obama transition team that reviewed the FEC for the incoming Democratic administration.

The new campaign finance disclosures also showed that, a month after ending his presidential bid, billionaire Michael Bloomberg paid Venable nearly $1 million in April. Venable is representing Bloomberg in a case filed by former campaign field organizers.

Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, spent another $255,000 on legal consulting from Willkie Farr & Gallagher that month, according to his campaign's latest financial disclosure.

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