​A political group that supports Donald Trump spent more than $40 million on legal costs in the first half of 2023 to defend the former president, his advisers and others, sources familiar with a filing detailing the costs confirmed to ABC News.

That number spent by the Save America leadership PAC, Trump's main fundraising arm, was first reported by The Washington Post.

The financial filing is expected to be released Monday.

The mounting costs come as Trump faces mounting legal troubles, including a superseding indictment handed up from a federal grand jury via special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into Trump's allegedly improper retention of classified documents after leaving office.

MSNBC's Claire McCaskill isn't buying the excuse that Donald Trump kept classified documents as keepsakes from his presidency and instead suggested he was planning on selling them.

...McCaskill agreed that Trump posed a national security threat and speculated that he was planning to sell classified materials to Saudi Arabia.

"It's just fascinating to me that people in Congress who understand the consequences of what he has done and how he has done it, continue to defend him," she said. "I mean, you know, we've talked about what he would do with these documents. One of the things ... is that he could use them to continue to curry favor with Saudi Arabia, and what could Saudi Arabia do for Donald Trump right now? They could cut production of oil and raise gas prices. Nothing could hurt Joe Biden more than raising gas prices next year, three, four months from the election, and Trump knows that."​

​If Donald Trump gets his wish, he’ll soon take the three convicted or accused war criminals he spared from consequence on the road as special guests in his re-election campaign, according to two sources who have heard Trump discuss their potential roles for the 2020 effort.

Despite military and international backlash to Trump’s Nov. 15 clemency—fallout from which cost Navy Secretary Richard Spencer his job on Sunday—Trump believes he has rectified major injustices. Two people tell The Daily Beast they’ve heard Trump talk about how he’d like to have the now-cleared Clint Lorance, Matthew Golsteyn, or Edward Gallagher show up at his 2020 rallies, or even have a moment on stage at his renomination convention in Charlotte next year. Right-wing media have portrayed all three as martyrs brought down by “political correctness” within the military.

​A former Homeland Security adviser in the Trump administration said Sunday that the unsubstantiated claim that Ukraine was responsible for the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016 is a "conspiracy theory" with "no validity."

Tom Bossert, who served in administration between 2017 and 2018, made the comments on ABC's "This Week" while condemning Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, for "repeating the debunked theory" related to Ukraine and the DNC server to the president. 

The comments from Bossert came in light of revelations that Trump addressed the hack of the DNC during a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

"It’s not only a conspiracy theory, it is completely debunked," Bossert said, adding that he communicated this to Trump during his time working in the administration.