Trump Demands DOJ Pay $230 Million for Investigating Him — And His Cronies Get to Approve Payout: Report
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President Donald Trump is seeking a $230 million payout from the Department of Justice as compensation for the multiple federal investigations into him, The New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing several people familiar with the matter.
And Trump’s own appointees and allies are the ones who will have the power to green-light the potential nine-figure payout.
“The situation has no parallel in American history,” wrote the Times’ Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager, “as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims. It is also the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department.”
The complaints submitted by the president under the federal government’s administrative claim process are connected to investigations into “Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign,” the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, the criminal charges against him related to the mishandling of that classified material, and the investigations launched by former Attorney General Merrick Garland, former FBI Director Christopher Wray, and former Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who previously served as the president’s chief defense counsel and recently conducted a controversial prison interview with convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, “is one of two people eligible to sign off on such a settlement,” reported the Times.
Other Trump appointees who could potentially directly or indirectly affect the approval of any settlement include Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Stanley Woodward Jr., chief of the DOJ’s civil division who represented Trump’s co-defendant in the classified documents case, Walt Nauta, as well as Patel and other Trump aides in connection with investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot and other matters.
According to the Times, Trump had filed these complaints in 2023 and 2024, during President Joe Biden’s term, and cited several “former officials” at the DOJ who “privately expressed misgivings that the department’s leaders did not reject Mr. Trump’s legal claims in the waning days of the Biden administration,” instead of risking leaving that decision in the hands of Trump’s own appointees.
The situation poses “undeniable ethics challenges;” one legal ethics professor cited by the Times called it “a travesty,” as well as “bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe,” adding that having the president’s own appointees in the DOJ, ” the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses,” presents an “ethical conflict” that “is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”
If any settlement is approved, “[c]ompensation is typically covered by taxpayers,” noted the Times.
