Trump says he might give it to charity, or to the White House. Maybe. Maybe not. We might never know anything about it, from whether Trump’s Justice Department, run by Trump’s former lawyers, decided to gift him what he claims to be owed because of the “unfair” federal investigations into the Russian connections with his campaign and the raid at Mar-a-Lago after he lied about, then refused to return, secret documents which he retained and were found during the execution of a search warrant. Either way, Trump has demanded $230 million from the United States for himself.
President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 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.
When asked, Trump unsurprisingly acted as if he knew nothing about it and knew exactly what they were talking about.
As it turns out, this wasn’t exactly breaking news in the sense that it was something that just happened, but was something that began before he was elected to a second term.
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 F.B.I. 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.
Notably, Trump never revealed his demand for $230 million before, and the administrative claim process is not public. It’s not a lawsuit. It was not incumbent on the DoJ to disclose the claim, and in the event the DoJ approved the claim, or Trump decides to give it to himself as the supreme leader of DoJ, it would not be required to be made public. It might appear on the DoJ’s end of year disbursements, or it might be concealed within vague expenditures that fail to reveal where the funds went.
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.
Does this raise any ethical issues?
“What a travesty,” said Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University. “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.”
“Almost” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The notion of an ethical conflict mattering to Trump is “bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.” It clearly didn’t stop Trump.
The president’s conflict of interest in this situation is so broad as to have no parallel in American history. One ethics expert called it a “travesty.” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, called it “head spinning chutzpah.” Even Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge the bizarre nature of the demand that the government he controls pay him a fortune. “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,” he said. But no sense of shame seems likely to stop his demand for payback. His promise to give the Treasury cash to charity adds to the outrage, given his record of exploiting philanthropy for personal gain.
While I personally would not have quoted Blumenthal on the issue, he’s not wrong.
His demand for a $230 million payment from American taxpayers fits with an unconscionable pattern of self-dealing by the president and his family. He hosted a dinner for people who bought the most Trump-branded cryptocurrency. His company, the Trump Organization, is collaborating on real estate projects with Middle Eastern countries that rely on the United States in many ways. He has engaged in similar conflicts of interests with Serbia and Vietnam. The list goes on and on.
During Trump 1.0, I asserted that Trump has only two motivations, self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. Everything he does falls within one or the other, wrapped up in empty rhetoric or shameless and false lies. But even assuming against reality that Trump truly believes he’s been wronged (he was not) and is due something (he is not), if he was even remotely sincere about not taking the $230 million for himself, he could dedicate it back to the United States of America, to the treasury, to the taxpayers, to the People, and put an end to yet another unethical grift. That’s the one thing he hasn’t done here.
Mr. Trump should not profit from his presidency. He should pay a political price for his brazen corruption. Instead, he is telling American taxpayers to pay a price, directly to him.
If this is good with you, buy his sneakers. Buy his watches. Buy his bibles. Buy his memecoins. Karoline Leavitt proclaims with outrage that Trump would never use his office for his own financial benefit. She’s “almost” right.
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This is me on Halloweens past, altruistically removing my favorite candies from my kids’ haul, for their own good. 1000%. Especially the KitKats. Bad candy. (But it did save a tummy ache or two. Theirs, not mine.) Oh and the MadHatter will soon be suing 47 for trademark infringement. Just when it seemed impossible to get any crazier.
Mother Jones offered a succinct, single sentence summation on Trump’s statement, “His effort to put a generous spin on this blatant grift—there is no compelling evidence that the DOJ’s investigations were launched improperly—belies Trump’s long, sordid history of stiffing contractors, and, even more notoriously, the court-ordered dissolution of his namesake charitable arm over a “shocking pattern of illegality.”
But isn’t the bottom line that the answer to outrageously corrupt Presidential behavior is impeachment; and as long as enough of Congress isn’t outraged, or finds it inconvenient to be outraged (and the majority of the public doesn’t care enough to hold Congress accountable), then nothing is going to happen?
At this point it’s obvious that Trump’s presidency has gone off the rails. He has abandoned any pretense of fulfilling any of his campaign promises, and has revealed himself as just another money-grubbing politician who will do whatever his donors want. However the idea that he is some kind of uniquely corrupt figure is nonsense. His primary innovation is a shameless willingness to steal openly, kind of like the homeless guy who goes into Walgreens with his bicycle and fills a garbage bag full of items and then walks out. He’s a piker compared to the Clintons, who masterfully portrayed themselves as global philanthropists while stealing and influence-peddling on a scale that Trump could only dream of. Trump clumsily picks up a measly hundred million here and there, stumbling and bumbling through a thicket of disapproving news stories that depict him as the worlds biggest grifter, and it almost seems as if he relishes that title.
Meanwhile the neocon agenda continues to advance regardless of who plays the role of president. It’s almost enough to make you think that elections are a pointless exercise designed to create the illusion that we the people have some input into government policy.
When you have these delusions, are they in color or black and white?
This is what the conspiracy nuts claim about the Clintons. They make up bizarre facts that nobody knows about and nobody can prove because it’s all part of some grand conspiracy. So the fact that there’s no evidence is proof that it’s true.
[Ed. Note: Can we not go any farther down the conspiracy nut rabbit hole? TIA]
You forgot about the part where the Clintons are really lizard people from Uranus.
Attributed to Everett Dirksen.
“A million dollars here, a million dollars there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
It was the 60’s and it was a billion. But yes. Dirksen allegedly said this first. See above piker comment.
[Ed. Note: In 1938 the New York Times printed: “Well, now, about this new budget. It’s a billion here and a billion there, and by and by it begins to mount up into money.”]