Trump campaign paid legal fees to firm representing Jared Kushner originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

President Donald Trump's campaign has spent nearly $100,000 of donor money to pay legal bills to the firm representing Jared Kushner, the latest campaign finance records show.

The president's re-election campaign made two payments to the firm, Winston & Strawn LLP – $55,330 and $42,574. The expenditures were payments to Kushner's attorney Abbe Lowell for Kushner’s legal fees, sources with knowledge of the payments told to ABC News. Lowell joined the firm in May 2018.

(MORE: Kushner denies colluding with Russia, says Trump ran 'smarter campaign')

“Low dollar” contributions – $200 or less – made up 98.5 percent of the total funds raised by the Trump campaign in the last quarter of 2018, a consistent trend throughout the year, according to a press release by the campaign, along with the latest campaign finance filings.

Kushner, who is married to Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka, is a real estate scion who earned more than $1.7 million in income in 2015, the year before he joined his wife’s family to work in the White House, according to a New York Times review of confidential financial documents published in October. His net worth has been estimated at more than $300 million.

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Like many Trump campaign insiders, Kushner has required legal guidance as he has attempted to navigate the special counsel and congressional investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Kushner has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing.

PHOTO: Senior Advisor to President Donald J. Trump Jared Kushner waits for President Trump to deliver remarks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C., Jan. 25, 2019. (Michael Reynolds/EPA via Shutterstock) More

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A spokesman for the Trump campaign declined to comment on the decision to direct campaign money to the legal fees facing the president’s son-in-law.

Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for Lowell, said the payments extend only to legal fees incurred for litigation involving Kushner’s work on the campaign.

“This legal work was performed on behalf of the Trump campaign to assist them in defending against a baseless and political case brought by the DNC,” Mirijanian said in a statement. “All campaigns and business cover the legal expenses of people working for them when sued. Mr. Kushner has personally paid all of his separate legal fees to date.”

One source familiar with the reimbursements told ABC News that near the end of 2018, the campaign covered legal expenses for several former senior staff members who had testified before congressional committees. The House intelligence committee had afforded each person who testified the chance to have a lawyer review a transcript of their testimony as part of a plan to eventually see the transcripts made public.

Senior members of the campaign have incurred legal expenses in connection with a civil suit by the Democratic National Committee. It is unclear whether the campaign also reimbursed those campaign officials for those expenses.

The DNC filed the civil suit in April accusing a long list of defendants, Kushner among them, of being part of a conspiracy involving Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

In December, Lowell filed a 22-page motion seeking to have a judge remove Kushner from the suit. In it, Lowell disputed the allegation that Kushner was part of a conspiracy against the Democrats in 2016, saying the DNC lawsuit “does not contain a single factual allegation implicating Kushner in the alleged wrongdoing.”

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There has not yet been a ruling on the motion.

Kushner also spent a total of more than nine hours during two interviews with Mueller's team. The first meeting, which happened in late 2017, largely dealt with Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and the second meeting, which occurred in April of 2018, focused on the campaign, the transition and other topics, including the circumstances of the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, as ABC News has previously reported. “I would say it is the definition of cooperation,” Lowell told CNN last year.

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