The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 24 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
As you may have heard by now, President Trump is reportedly demanding that the Justice Department pay him $230 million in damages relating to certain federal actions against him. It’s a naked effort to help himself to huge gobs of taxpayer money on an extraordinarily corrupt basis. Congressman Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sent a scalding letter to the White House today on this, demanding all communications related to this shakedown. What really struck us was how directly this letter indicted Trump’s corruption and criminality. It was one of the most forceful takedowns we’ve seen in a while, and it made some critical legal points as well. This is a wild scandal and we want to understand it better. So we’re talking about it all with the University of Michigan’s Leah Litman, author of Lawless, a book about the Supreme Court. Leah, nice to have you on.
Leah Litman: Great to be back.
Sargent: So just to quickly catch people up, Trump filed claims in 2023 and 2024, when he was out of office, against DOJ seeking $230 million in damages he allegedly suffered during the Russia investigation and the indictment of him for stealing state secrets.
He’s now seeking that money as president. One of the people who decides the fate of these claims is Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who just happens to be Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer.
Leah, I think most people who hear this will just think it sounds crazy, insane—that it can’t possibly be true. But it does seem to be true.
Can you quickly catch us up on the basic legal ins and outs of this?
Litman: Sure. I mean, it’s true he’s trying to do this, but I also want to reaffirm people’s instinct that there’s no way he should be able to get away with this because it is bonkers.
So I guess first, just quickly by way of background, the demands that he made—so federal law creates kind of an elaborate structure and process for suing the federal government when they violate your rights. There’s this background legal principle that the federal government is immune unless they have consented to being sued.
And so what the federal government did is it established this process that is laid out in the Federal Tort Claims Act that says, in certain instances, you can sue the federal government and obtain federal money again if the federal government violated your rights. But in order to do that, you have to first submit this demand letter to the federal government. They’ll review it, decide whether to settle, and if they opt not to settle, then you can proceed to try to recover money from them in federal court.
So that’s the process that Donald Trump began in 2023–2024, writing this demand letter to the Department of Justice.
Sargent: Right, just to be clear, this demand letter or it’s actually I think a couple of claims doesn’t constitute a lawsuit. He’s just making this initial claim. And what’s supposed to happen is if the federal government rejects the claim or decides not to settle, then he would sue, correct? So now he’s just saying as president, well, my Justice Department should actually just fulfill the claim to me.
Litman: Exactly. This is a prerequisite to filing suit. You’re right. At this stage, it is the federal government—and specifically his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, as well as the former lawyer for one of his co-defendants in the obstruction of justice classified documents case—who have the positions at the Department of Justice that allow them to decide whether to fork over the money that has been requested as part of these demand letters.
That is obscene. I mean, it’s obscene on so many levels. I guess I first want people to understand the federal government is not usually in the business of just handing out several hundreds of millions of dollars to people who allege their rights have been violated by the federal government. Suing the federal government is one of the most difficult tasks you can do.
There are a bunch of procedural obstacles and defenses that the United States can invoke and point to as a basis for not handing over the money that is being requested. And Donald Trump, again, just seems to want to bypass all of this and say, well, it’s my department, so I can effectively order them to just hand over the money that I have requested of them because I, Donald Trump, am the embodiment of the executive branch, and I am basically ordering my left arm to give my right arm several hundred millions of dollars.
It just, like, underscores the conceptual incoherence of this vision of the executive branch.
Sargent: Several hundred million dollars of our money, Leah.
Litman: Exactly, right? Like, when the Department of Justice pays over this money, it is taxpayer money. And watching this guy demolish the White House—which he doesn’t own, right?—to construct a ballroom that he is demanding private citizens and corporations pay for, at the same time he is formally demanding several hundreds of millions of dollars in additional money, it is grotesque.
I mean, we all knew he and his family have been trying to profit off of the presidency. And this just looks like they have decided, why even bother to do it through an intermediary? Why not just straight up demand, ‘Pay me the money.’
Sargent: He’s just sticking his hand into the treasury and trying to pull out over $200 million. So representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Dem on judiciary sent this powerful letter on this. He described the scheme as, “a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional effort to steal $230 million from the American people and then outrageous and shocking attempt to shake down the American people.” Raskin calls it theft straight out. And that’s not an exaggeration. It’s exactly what it is. Let’s start with the unconstitutional dimension of this. Is there any question that this would violate the domestic emoluments clause?
Litman: Not in my view. The domestic emoluments clause is a provision in the Constitution that basically prevents the president from accepting emoluments, profits, gifts from state and local governments, you know, while they hold office under the United States. This is a demand for several hundreds of millions of dollars that would come from taxpayer money, and that includes state and local governments. So this, in my view, is kind of obvious domestic emoluments clause violation, and he just thinks he can get away with it.
Sargent: Well, here’s what Raskin says about it in the letter, according to the domestic emoluments clause. “As president, you may not receive any payment from the federal government or any of the states except for your salary. That is a categorical prohibition not even waivable by Congress.” Forceful stuff, but 100 % true, right?
Litman: Yes. You know, there was litigation during the first Trump administration attempting to enforce the domestic and foreign emoluments clauses. You know, in those cases, which frankly now seem quaint in hindsight, the allegation was that his stake in his hotels and restaurants effectively allowed him to get money aside from his salary from both foreign governments and state and local governments. And now, again, he’s just discarding the intermediary that was his businesses and just raiding the treasury and treating all of our money as his personal piggy bank.
Sargent: Right. It’s like, in the old version of the scheme, he would have a bunch of Republican congressmen or whatever come stay at his hotel and eat at his restaurants. Or he would have a bunch of oligarchs from the Middle East come rent 50 rooms in one of his hotels and basically just hand him money that way.
He’s just completely stripping that out of the way and reaching into the Treasury and grabbing the money himself.
Litman: Right, exactly.
Sargent: Well, the underlying claims Trump is making here are also baloney. He wasn’t victimized by the Russia investigation or by the indictment of him for stealing state secrets. There was very strong evidence that he committed crimes. A judge found probable cause of this. But the point is that it’s even more wildly corrupt for him to seek this money as the president. It’s so conflicted, it’s hard to imagine. I want to read one more line from the letter from Raskin. “If your claims had any merit, you would have taken them to court by now and litigated them publicly. Instead, you waited until you became president and installed your handpicked loyalists at DOJ knowing that you could instruct them to co-sign your demand in secret behind closed doors.” I mean, I wish Democrats talked like that all the time, just calling the criming out for what it is, criming.
Litman: Yeah, and this is not hard to explain. You know, the idea that, as Raskin lays out, he would make this demand for several hundreds of millions of dollars based on baseless claims—he says, you violated my rights by deigning to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election; you violated my rights by conducting a search on my Mar-a-Lago property after I refused to turn over classified documents after repeated requests from the federal government to do so.
That is not a violation of his rights. They obtained judicial permission for doing so, and the underlying legal claims are baseless. The fact that, as Raskin outlines, he has apparently waited to move forward further with this demand until he installed his former personal lawyers and loyalists in the positions that would determine whether to settle these claims and hand him the money is evidence of corrupt motive.
And I mean, the thing is, even Donald Trump, who doesn’t think anyone should recuse—even Donald Trump, who has zero inclination for any ethical guidelines—even he seems to get that it’s weird that he would be in a position to have his cronies, who he installed, who he controls, in a position to decide whether he will get that several hundreds of millions of dollars. Like, even he gets this.
Sargent: Right. And that’s a reference to what Trump himself said about this to reporters. So folks, please listen to this.
President Donald Trump (voiceover): With the country, it’s interesting ‘cause I’m the one that makes a decision, right? And uh, 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, to give out one of those cases where you have to decide how much you’re paying yourself in damages, but I was damaged very greatly, and any money that I would get, I would give to charity.
Sargent: So Leah, in addition to your point that he seems to understand that this looks really bad: I think there’s something else we need to point out, which is that when he says this is his decision, he’s accidentally admitting that he’s appropriating for himself the power to command his deputy attorney general Todd Blanche to give him the $230 million if he says so. I found that just dumbfounding. He just said it straight out. You know, I have the power to tell him to do this. Am I wrong?
Litman: Well, I mean, it is confounding that he would admit it. On the other hand, he is just straight out drawing from the Supreme Court’s decisions on the executive branch, because the Supreme Court has told him that all of these subordinate executive officials—you, the president, control them.
They are merely exercising your whims and your view of executive power and how you think federal law should be executed. And we have insisted that you have the authority to remove all of these individuals precisely to ensure that they do your bidding. And they have emphasized that this is especially true when it comes to the Department of Justice, which they insist on treating as an arm of the president.
So yes, it’s absurd. It’s confounding. It obviously underscores how corrupt and insane this entire deal is. But he is drawing from what the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have said about the executive branch—which, of course, just underscores how ridiculous their theory is and always has been.
Sargent: Well, I’m hopeful that we can get inside this process a little more. Raskin’s letter, which was written with oversight committees, ranking Democrat Robert Garcia demands any and all internal communications between Trump, his lawyers and Justice Department officials discussing Trump’s effort to get his hands on this booty, basically. That includes Deputy AG Todd Blanche. So if Trump and Blanche communicated about this, it would potentially be in a paper trail or if other officials went back and forth on it, that would be in a paper trail. And Raskin also asks in the letter for all DOJ analysis of the situation. Now, Leah, I don’t think the White House and DOJ will turn this over. And of course, no Republican will ask for any of this, of course. But if Democrats win the House, they could use subpoena power to pursue it. Can you explain why it’s so essential to get that material and what it could yield?
Litman: Yeah, I mean, it could show that it is indeed the president who is making these directives. It could show that they didn’t actually bother to assess whether this complies with the Constitution. This could show that they just rejected out of hand the understanding that, of course, this would appear corrupt and there is a major conflict of interest and that they just don’t care. And so I think that all of this material has the potential to just further kind of show and expose the administration for what it is they are doing.
Sargent: Yeah, you could have a situation where these internal communications show that Trump essentially directed his former personal attorney to hand over the money.
Litman: I mean, for all we know, they’re having a great laugh about this over Signal in their Signal chats or in his Truth Social DMs. Like, we just don’t know. And that’s the sort of material that Representative Raskin and Garcia like they’re asking for.
Sargent: Exactly. And it’s essential we get that. So just as a quick aside, Raskin’s letter also says Trump committed a statutory violation here as well, or he’s trying to. Can you give us a quick glimpse of that?
Litman: Yeah. So Representative Raskin is saying that Donald Trump is requesting a kind of damages and amount of money that federal law doesn’t actually authorize anyone to get from the federal government. So Representative Raskin says, this federal statute, the Federal Tort Claims Act, doesn’t allow you to get punitive damages against the federal government. And punitive damages are kind of damages that aren’t tied to the actual economic material harm that someone experienced. They are designed to basically punish extra bad behavior. And you can’t get punitive damages against the federal government. And Raskin is saying, look, you are asking for an amount of money that federal law doesn’t authorize anyone to get. So even putting aside the blatant conflict of interest and corruption, the idea that your cronies or lackeys would approve this deal, they are approving a deal that they have no authority to even make under federal law to the extent you are seeking these punitive damages.
Sargent: It’s all pretty appalling. Well, OK, so so back to the Supreme Court in a very big sense the Supreme Court has landed us in this situation writ large, right?
Litman: Oh, yeah. Where to even begin? So, you know, I’ve already kind of gestured to the idea that the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court and the right-wing legal movement have been beating this drum about the unitary executive theory—insisting that the Constitution makes all individuals within the executive branch, specifically DOJ, who exercise any executive power, they are mere arms of the president, and the president gets to direct them and control them and tell them how to do their jobs and fire them if he doesn’t like how they are doing their jobs.
And they have insisted the Constitution requires this arrangement, and they have insisted this is awesome and this is a great way of structuring government. And of course, we are seeing it is a recipe for corruption. It is a recipe for autocracy. Because if you tell this president, ‘Yeah, the Department of Justice, you just own all of that and can control and direct it,’ you know, surprise, surprise—he’s going to use it for corrupt ends.
And in some of the more shocking passages in their immunity decision, the Supreme Court said, look, whenever the president is exercising official duties that are core and exclusive to the president—which, by the way, include investigative and prosecutorial functions—it doesn’t matter if the president is exercising those powers for corrupt ends, for sham investigations, or here, maybe for baseless legal claims that again are riddled with conflicts of interest and corruption.
So the idea that all executive officers are just serving at the arm of the president and the president has to have that degree of control over offices like DOJ was always a recipe for disaster, and we are just seeing that materialize in real time.
And I should also note that in Donald Trump’s demand letter, where he requested these several hundreds of millions of dollars—guess what he invoked? The Supreme Court’s immunity decision, saying prosecutors should have been able to anticipate that he would be entitled to immunity. And so he said that immunity decision, that just underscores that you all were violating the law and violating my rights, and the Supreme Court vindicated me. So therefore, pay me several hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sargent: I just want to be sure I understand this correctly. He’s saying that his rights were violated by the federal government because they were trying to hold him accountable to crimes which a judge said there was probable cause he committed.
Litman: Yes, exactly.
Sargent: That can’t be true. No, seriously it’s like a kid. It’s it doesn’t compute.
Litman: No, and it again makes a mockery of their view of the Constitution because, of course, the president here is saying, it is a violation of my rights to execute and enforce federal law.
Well, guess what provision the Supreme Court has grounded this insane theory of executive power in? The provision in the Constitution that directs the president to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. They have insisted that that power is what allows the president to control everyone in the executive branch, fire people he doesn’t agree with, and have immunity and direct DOJ.
But that just can’t be true because, again, that’s what’s enabling the president to make this upside-down assertion that in order to enforce federal law, you can’t enforce federal law.
It’s just nuts.
Sargent: Yeah. And I think this also reveals something very dark about the MAGA movement more broadly, which is that MAGA thinks all of this is good. It’s not like you could go to the MAGA movement and say, hey, look, he promised to drain the swamp, and now look, he is the swamp. He’s enriching himself at your expense—taxpayers, MAGA taxpayers.
They think if Trump succeeds, they’re succeeding because it gets you and me angry. Basically, what this really gets at is Trump is kind of reinventing the presidency as a bribe delivery system. Like, in so many ways, he’s created these new avenues for big institutions to channel money in the direction that Trump wants them to, right?
Like, the threats to law firms and universities invite them to hand over huge sums towards his “causes.” His lawsuits against the media companies give their corporate overlords a way to bribe him, you know, with payments to the “presidential library” to ensure governmental approval for other business.
And then look at someone like Todd Blanche. I think Marcy Wheeler has pointed this out, which is that Todd Blanche could be legally vulnerable, right? He’s, as deputy AG, potentially, you know, committing his own criminal violations in the decisions that he’s making in all sorts of ways. And so could a guy like that possibly say no when Trump says, ‘Hand me two hundred thirty million dollars’?
I mean, his fate depends on Trump pardoning him. So, like, it’s another invitation for a bribe, basically.
Litman: Exactly. When you make everyone’s future, their career, their liberty depend on the whims and decisions of one person, that is a recipe for abuses of power, which we are seeing because even if, you know, Deputy A.G. Blanche thinks, well, look what I am doing that might violate it, violate a ton of federal laws. You know, he might be thinking, well, Donald Trump will pardon me. And so who cares? As long as I remain on this guy’s good side, I basically have a get out of jail free card.
Sargent: It’s almost like the authoritarian regime is figuring out a way to sort of self enforce loyalty to it, or to him.
Litman: Yep. Yeah.
Sargent: And just to close this out, like that’s something that MAGA thinks is good, too. They have no conception of the public interest or the law or the rule of law really it’s whatever is good for Trump is is is good for the country.
Litman: Yeah they have completely collapsed the distinction between Donald Trump’s private interests and the public interests and the nation’s interest and you can see this in myriad ways you know when Donald Trump refers to the weaponization of the Department of Justice all he’s talking about is efforts to enforce the law against him but all of a sudden that becomes this big principle that is about our national interest because he was legally vulnerable and he faced a risk of liability.
Sargent: So is he going to get the money?
Litman: You know, the fact that I can’t say no is the biggest indictment of how much they have subverted and just, you know, abused the federal government. I don’t know. I really don’t. I think there is a possibility that this is the sort of thing where enough people understand this is straight up theft. And it can’t be that this guy, you know, who ran on this platform of, I’m going to make all of your lives, you know, easier by reducing costs and reducing taxes. Now he gets to extract this huge cost from all of us. mean, that just cannot be. And I would hope that that would be something that could break through to enough people, even if not to MAGA, to enough independents or people who are not likely to vote or low information voters to start to register in ways that make the Republican Party unwilling to go along with this.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what, if this isn’t enough to break through, then I don’t know if anything is. Folks, if you enjoyed this discussion, make sure to check out Leah Litman’s book, Lawless. It’s all about the Supreme Court. Leah, thank you so much for coming on with us, even though that was really some stiff medicine.
Litman: Thanks for having me.
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