Trump says US Justice Department owes him money for past cases

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about US$230 million (S$298.66 million) in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior department officials who defended him or those in his orbit.

The situation has no parallel in American history, 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.

Mr Trump submitted complaints through an administrative claim process that often is the precursor to lawsuits. The first claim, lodged in late 2023, seeks damages for a number of purported violations of his rights, including the FBI and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the claim has not been made public.

The second complaint, filed in the summer of 2024, accuses the FBI of violating Mr Trump’s privacy by

searching Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence

in Florida, in 2022 for classified documents. It also accuses the Justice Department of malicious prosecution in charging him with mishandling sensitive records after he left office.

Asked about the issue at the White House after this article published, the president said: “I was damaged very greatly, and any money I would get, I would give to charity.”

He added: “I’m the one that makes the decision, and that decision would have to go across my desk, and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”

Lawyers said the nature of the president’s legal claims poses undeniable ethics challenges.

“What a travesty,” said Pace University’s ethics professor Bennett L. Gershman. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”

He added: “And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”

The president seemed to acknowledge that point in the Oval Office last week, when he alluded vaguely to the situation while standing next to FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche. According to Justice Department regulations, the deputy attorney general – in this case, Mr Blanche – is one of two people eligible to sign off on such a settlement.

“I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, I’m sort of suing myself,” Mr Trump said. “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.”

Administrative claims are not technically lawsuits. Such complaints are submitted first to the Justice Department on what is called a Standard Form 95, to see if a settlement can be reached without a lawsuit in federal court. If the department formally rejects such a claim or declines to act on it, a person could then sue in court. Still, that is an unlikely outcome in this instance, given that Mr Trump is already negotiating, in essence, with his subordinates.

Compensation is typically covered by taxpayers. Two people familiar with the president’s legal claims said that he had not been paid by the federal government but that he expected to be.

The second claim accused Mr Merrick Garland, then the attorney general; Mr Christopher Wray, then the FBI director; and Mr Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Mr Trump at the time, of “harassment” intended to sway the electoral outcome. “This malicious prosecution led President Trump to spend tens of millions of dollars defending the case and his reputation,” the claim said.

According to the Justice Department manual, settlements of claims against the department for more than US$4 million “must be approved by the deputy attorney general or associate attorney general”, meaning the person who oversees the civil division.

The current deputy attorney general, Mr Blanche, served as Mr Trump’s lead criminal defence lawyer and said at his confirmation hearing in February that his attorney-client relationship with the president continued. The chief of the department’s civil division, Mr Stanley Woodward Jr., represented Mr Trump’s co-defendant, Mr Walt Nauta, in the classified documents case. Mr Woodward has also represented a number of other Trump aides, including Mr Patel, in investigations related to Mr Trump or the Capitol riot on Jan 6, 2021.

A spokesperson for the president’s personal legal team said he was fighting back against the Russia investigation, which he has long denounced as a witch hunt, and what he has called the weaponisation of the criminal justice system by the Biden administration.

A White House spokesperson referred questions to the Justice Department.

Asked if either Mr Blanche or Mr Woodward would recuse or have been recused from overseeing the possible settlement with Mr Trump, a Justice Department spokesperson, Mr Chad Gilmartin, said: “In any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials.”

In July, Ms Bondi fired the agency’s top ethics adviser.

Mr Trump famously hates recusals. He complained bitterly after his first attorney general, Mr Jeff Sessions, withdrew from overseeing the Russia investigation that is now the subject of one of his demands for money.

“The attorney general made a terrible mistake when he did this and when he recused himself,” Mr Trump said in 2018. “He should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself, and we would have used a – put a different attorney general in.”

The Justice Department does not specifically require a public announcement of settlements made for administrative claims before they become lawsuits. If or when the Trump administration pays the president what could be hundreds of millions of dollars, there may be no immediate official declaration that it did so, according to current and former department officials.

Some former officials have privately expressed misgivings that the department’s leaders did not reject Mr Trump’s legal claims in the waning days of the Biden administration. It has long been standard practice for civil litigation, including lawsuits against the government, to be paused until any criminal cases around the same facts have been resolved. NYTIMES