President Donald Trump’s plan to seek $230 million from the Justice Department as a settlement for investigations he faced during the Biden administration and his first term in office is unparalleled in American history, according to an ABC News legal contributor.
Trump is seeking damages related to the investigation he faced surrounding allegations of his 2016 campaign’s ties to the Russian government and the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents in August 2022.
Approval of the payout, resulting from two administrative claims that were submitted by attorneys for Trump while he was out of office in 2023 and 2024, would likely first need sign-off from top officials in the department who previously served as Trump’s defense attorneys or otherwise represented his allies.
Here is what Trump has said about the arrangement.
Who would decide about the payment?
Trump, asked Tuesday by reporters in the Oval Office about the New York Times’ story that first reported the development, said the decision would “go across my desk.”
“It’s interesting, because I’m the one that makes a decision, right?” Trump said. “And you know that decision would have to go across my desk, and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”
“In other words, did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you’re paying yourself in damages?” he said.
Would the payment represent a conflict of interest?
Trump, in an appearance in the Oval Office last week with Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, appeared to acknowledge the unusual nature of the Justice Department paying out a settlement to the current sitting president.
“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,” Trump said. “It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right?”
According to the Justice Manual, any settlement would have to get sign-off from either the deputy attorney general or the associate attorney general. Blanche represented Trump in both the classified documents case and the Jan. 6 case brought by then-special counsel Jack Smith, and the associate attorney general, Stan Woodward, represented Walt Nauta, Trump’s co-defendant in the classified documents case.
Trump pleaded not guilty in both cases before both were dropped following Trump’s reelection, due to a long-standing Justice Department policy barring the prosecution of a sitting president.
Where would the payment come from?
In his remarks to reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday, Trump said of the Justice Department, “I don’t even talk to them about it — all I know is that they would owe me a lot of money, but I don’t, I’m not looking for money. I’d give it to charity or something. But I was damaged very greatly, and any money that I would get, I would give to charity.”
Asked whether either Blanche or Woodward would be considered conflicted out of signing off on such a settlement, a DOJ spokesperson told ABC News, “In any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials.”
Hofstra University law professor James Sample said the arrangement would raise serious ethical questions.
“Not only do we have the president overseeing the individuals who would make the determination of whether or not he gets the compensation he seeks — those individuals owe him their very jobs,” Sample told ABC News Live on Thursday.
“We are running out of synonyms for the word ‘unprecedented,’” Sample said.
The post Here’s what Trump has said about seeking $230M settlement from DOJ appeared first on ABC News.
