Donald Trump might be in jail if he had not won the 2024 presidential election. And he might not have won the election if the Supreme Court hadn’t invented an expansive form of immunity to protect him from the consequences of his criminal actions.
And now it’s time for Trump to get paid—with your tax dollars.
Wait, what?
Yes, Trump is demanding that the Department of Justice give him $230 million as compensation for being the subject of past federal investigations, according to The New York Times. He’s reportedly submitted his claims through an administrative claim process, under the Federal Tort Claims Act, and he has apparently done a bit of back-of-the-envelope math to come up with the idea that the U.S. taxpayers owe him nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.
Before we get into exactly what Trump wants compensation for, let’s talk about why he will very likely get $230 million of your tax dollars.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, shown in August.
FTCA claims can be approved by the deputy attorney general, who happens to be Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s many former personal lawyers. Blanche is such a Trump fanboy that he thinks left-wing protesters should be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. He’s so ethically compromised that he doesn’t appear to have recused himself from a DOJ brief filed on Trump’s behalf in one of his ceaseless attempts to make his 34 felony convictions go away.
In other words, this is not a guy who is going to say no to the president.
The other person eligible to sign off (or not) on the payoff is the chief of the DOJ’s civil division. In this case, that’s Stanley Woodward Jr., who represented Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta, in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. So again, it isn’t like he’s going to stand up for the rights of taxpayers to not give money to Trump as a reward for being corrupt.
And what is it that Trump thinks warrants him being paid $230 million? You will be unsurprised to learn it is just all the same grievances he always has.
Trump submitted his first claim back in 2023, saying he is owed money because his rights were supposedly violated during the government’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Of course, it isn’t clear what compensation one would deserve for being the subject of an investigation that definitively found that Trump associates impeded federal proceedings, tried to influence testimony, and that there were “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” according to the special counsel report on the matter.
Trump’s second claim blames then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, then-Director of the FBI Christopher Wray, and then-special counsel Jack Smith of “harassment” in an effort to swing the 2024 election. According to his FTCA claim, it was unfair that Trump had to “spend tens of millions of dollars defending the case and his reputation.”
Pages from a Department of Justice court filing on Aug. 30, 2022, related to the documents seized during the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago.
Come on. Trump used donor money to pay his legal bills.
In the second claim, he also wants compensation for the FBI supposedly violating his privacy when it conducted a search of his Mar-a-Lago. estate.
This is unhinged, even by Trump standards. The FBI had duly executed warrants and undertook a search only after the National Archives had tried for over a year to get the purloined documents back.
The only way in which it can be considered a violation of Trump’s privacy is to assert that no one can ever execute any law enforcement action against Trump.
And come to think of it, that’s kind of what the immunity decision said. Trump should make sure to send a thank-you note to Supreme Court Justice John Roberts for that.
Trump has been fairly open about his efforts, explaining in an Oval Office meeting last week, “I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, I’m sort of suing myself. I don’t know, how do you settle the lawsuit, I’ll say give me X dollars, and I don’t know what to do with the lawsuit. … It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit that was very strong, very powerful.”
He does not have any known lawsuits related to this. Thus far, he has only FTCA claims, which often precede a lawsuit against the federal government if it refuses to settle the claim. But why would Trump actually need to sue? His toadies at the DOJ can just approve the administrative claim.
It should be a five-alarm fire that, in the middle of the GOP’s government shutdown, Trump is demanding taxpayers cough up hundreds of millions of dollars to slake his endless twin thirsts for grifting cash and airing his grievances. But these days? It’s just par for the course for a president who sees the federal government as his personal piggy bank.
