President Donald Trump said Tuesday he’s probably owed “a lot of money,” responding to a newspaper report that he was seeking $230 million US in damages related to two investigations into his conduct.
The New York Times reported Trump had filed administrative claims before he was re-elected last November, concerning both the FBI’s 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago property for classified documents and for a separate investigation years earlier into potential ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign.
The status of the claims and any negotiations over them within the Justice Department was not immediately clear. A Justice Department spokesperson told The Associated Press that “in any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials.”
But Trump, in his response to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, said any decision would “have to go across my desk.”
“The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it,” Bennett Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University, told the New York Times, calling the situation “a travesty.”
The latest revelation comes amid Democratic assertions that the Justice Department is helping Trump target political rivals, as three of his critics have recently been indicted.
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The New York Times said one of the administrative claims, filed in 2024 and reviewed by The Associated Press, seeks compensatory and punitive damages over the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022.
His lawyer who filed the claim alleged the case was a “malicious prosecution” carried out by the Joe Biden administration to hurt Trump’s bid to reclaim the White House, forcing Trump to spend tens of millions of dollars in his defence.
But prosecutors alleged that Trump, who was a private citizen at the time, resisted repeated requests to return all of the documents and looked to prevent some of the documents from being retrieved after a subpoena was issued. Trump faced 37 felony charges, which included alleged violations of the Espionage Act, and prosecutors said the documents included 18 marked top secret, 54 secret and 31 confidential.
It was one of four criminal indictments that Trump faced between his two presidencies, and Jack Smith was appointed in November 2022 to oversee the case. A Florida judge would eventually dismiss the documents case, but a planned appeal from Smith’s team was rendered moot when Trump won the election last year.
“The idea that politics would play a role in big cases like this, it’s absolutely ludicrous and it’s totally contrary to my experience as a prosecutor,” Smith said in a recent, rare interview since leaving office.
The New York Times said the other complaint seeks damages related to the long-concluded Trump-Russia investigation, which continues to infuriate the president . Special counsel Robert Mueller said in 2019 that charging Trump was never on the table, but he did stress the investigation couldn’t exonerate him from allegations he obstructed with the probe.
Mueller’s report said that while a conspiracy between Trump campaign members and Russian officials couldn’t be established, on multiple occasions Trump associates lied to investigators about contacts with Russian individuals. The Trump campaign also welcomed Russian efforts to damage Trump’s opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Repeats false 2020 election claims
Beyond the two claims, Trump on Tuesday appeared to raise the spectre of possible compensation related to “the fraud of the [2020] election.”
Recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states of 2020 all affirmed Biden’s victory. Judges, including some Trump appointed, rejected dozens of his legal challenges.
William Barr, attorney general in 2020 and a staunch defender of Trump, told The Associated Press in the election aftermath there was no evidence of widespread fraud that would have changed the election result. Barr later told a congressional committee that the claims of fraud were “bullshit.”
John Bolton pleaded not guilty to 18 counts of mishandling classified information and, in a written statement, vowed to defend his own “lawful conduct” and to expose U.S. President Donald Trump’s “abuse of power.” The former national security advisor is the latest Trump enemy to end up charged.
Nevertheless, a large number of Trump supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory. Smith, the special counsel, was also overseeing an indictment into Trump’s alleged role in fomenting that riot, another case that fell away with Trump’s 2024 election win.
Trump early this year pardoned nearly everyone criminally charged with participating in that attack, including leaders of militant groups charged with seditious conspiracy.
At least 11 rioters have been re-arrested, charged or sentenced for other crimes including child sexual abuse, plotting to murder FBI agents and reckless homicide while driving drunk, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. That includes a man just charged with threatening to kill Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Trump first signalled his interest in compensation publicly during a White House appearance last week with deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“We knew some in the administration wanted to pay ‘restitution’ to the January 6th insurrectionists,” Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff said on social media on Tuesday. “Now the president wants the biggest payout for the one who incited it.”
Schiff, a manager during Trump’s first impeachment by the House of Representatives in late 2019, is reportedly being investigated for mortgage fraud. Other Trump critics have been indicted in recent weeks: former FBI director James Comey to New York Attorney General Letitia James — also for alleged mortgage fraud — and John Bolton, national security adviser in Trump’s first term, who faces indictment for improper handling of classified documents.
Trump said if the Justice Department signed off on compensation for the investigations, he could donate the money to charity or put it toward renovations for the White House, amid a controversial, ongoing demolition job in the East Wing as he pushes forward with plans to renovate the White House’s ballroom.
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