Some of former president Donald Trump’s co-defendants in a Georgia election interference case are receiving legal funding from a charity started to help people charged in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to people familiar with the group.
The Courage Under Fire Legal Defense Fund, which has not been previously reported, is a project of a nonprofit known as Personnel Policy Operations, or PPO. The group is vetting and recommending staff for a potential second Trump administration, drawing on the experience of former administration aides, people familiar with the effort said.
Details about the legal fund clarify how Trump allies have been paying for lawyers in the face of multiple overlapping congressional, federal and state investigations. People involved in the effort described the legal fund as a necessary safety net for potential appointees who might otherwise be deterred from serving in a Trump White House.
“I’m dealing with millions of dollars in legal fees. I suppose if I had a billionaire hanging out ready to help, that would be nice, but that’s not the world in which we live,” said Eastman, who is being prosecuted in Arizona in addition to being charged in Georgia, was described as a co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Trump, and has had his law license suspended. “One of the things that people need to be concerned about in taking on a role in any administration is if they’re going to end up with a big target on their back. Knowing that people will stand up to help defend you makes it easier for people to be willing to take on those roles.”
The fund has spent about $3.2 million with major support from Tim Dunn, a Texas oil billionaire, according to the people familiar with the group who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss its internal operations. Dunn is also a major donor to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ Conservative Partnership Institute, and he gave $5 million to MAGA Inc., the major pro-Trump super PAC. Dunn did not respond to a request for comment.
PPO’s legal defense fund supplements a separate group, known as the Patriot Legal Defense Fund, that formed to cover Trump’s own legal costs after donors to Trump’s campaign and political action committee balked at how much money was going to lawyers. The Georgia Republican Party has also been covering legal expenses for some defendants there.
A person involved in fundraising for legal defense said donors are motivated to help when they learn about lesser-known people in need of assistance. Co-defendants in the Georgia case have been energized by the discovery of Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis’s relationship with one of her employees, leading to an effort to disqualify her from the case that is now being considered by an appeals court and could delay a trial until after the November election. The fundraising efforts for legal defense augment Trump’s campaign message that assails independent prosecutions for election subversion as selective and malicious political persecutions.
“Many of us have been targeted, and in our bones we all get what motivates someone to want to serve, to work, to die for our country,” said Andrew Kloster, PPO’s co-founder and former general counsel. “It’s about the willingness to stand with someone at what’s often the most difficult time in their life — and not abandon them.”
The name PPO is a play on the White House Personnel Office where PPO’s president, Troup Hemenway, worked under Trump. The group’s other key officers are Joshua Whitehouse, who served in Trump’s departments of agriculture, homeland security and defense, and Joe Guy, who worked on personnel at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The early years of Trump’s White House Personnel Office were known for inexperienced aides and juvenile antics. A second wave of staffers toward the end of the administration, led by John McEntee and James Bacon, made their mark with unswerving loyalty to the president and clashes with agency experts.
“It was only in the fourth year of Trump’s term, when he brought on a new team of loyalists in his Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), that detractors began to be identified, removed, and replaced with other Trump loyalists who would diligently carry out his policy agenda,” Guy wrote in a recent op-ed for the pro-Trump website The Federalist. “If those currently holding positions of authority in these organizations don’t think it is feasible that there was election fraud in 2020, they should be removed from their position and replaced with someone serious.” (Since Trump’s campaign took over the Republican National Committee in March, job candidates have been asked about his unfounded insistence that the 2020 election was stolen.)
The PPO began as an extension of planned shake-ups that those aides started sketching out before the 2020 election. In addition to raising money for legal defense, the group has been assembling lists of recommendations for administration appointees who would be ideologically synced with Trump’s agenda.
People familiar to the work described it as separate from the better-known “conservative LinkedIn” being developed under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 collaboration with CPI and other right-wing groups to aid in staffing the next Trump administration. (Hemenway also advises that project at Heritage, as do McEntee and Bacon.)
But Heritage’s database, approaching 10,000 resumes, does not collect derogatory information about applicants, and some hard-liners within the coalition are suspicious of other partner organizations letting people into the coalition without MAGA bona fides. PPO has run its own vetting and offers its own recommendations for the eventual official presidential transition.
“You need negative information and blacklists, but I don’t think Heritage is the right place for it,” a person involved in the project said. “Someone does need to do it.”
Officials from PPO and Project 2025 are in regular contact with Trump campaign advisers, though the groups’ activities are officially separate and unsanctioned. The campaign has repeatedly chastised outside groups, in public and private, for jockeying with one another for better positioning in a future administration and for disclosures about their plans that have at times generated bad publicity. Trump has also complained to advisers about outside groups’ fundraising efforts that he views as competing with his campaign or profiting from his brand.
“Let us be very specific here: Unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official,” senior campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in December.
PPO also took over a website that posts personal financial disclosures of Biden administration political appointees, modeled after a database of Trump appointees run by the investigative reporting website ProPublica. The group is examining career civil servants to make recommendations on who could be trusted and who should be reassigned or removed in a second Trump administration, according to people familiar with the work.
The research is based on publications and social media as well as the experiences of administration alumni. Trump has pledged to reimplement a policy making it easier to fire uncooperative civil servants, following complaints of bureaucratic resistance to his presidency.
“Time is too short for an administration to waste on self-sabotage,” Hemenway wrote in a recent op-ed. “Conservative organizations have now become laser-focused on the staffing challenge.”
