Earlier this year, Mother Jones published an article headlined “10 Ways to Enrich the Trumps and the MAGA Movement.”
Examples included buying crypto with the proceeds filling Trump family pockets, paying up to a million dollars to a Trump PAC for access to the president, shelling out excessive settlements to end dubious lawsuits filed by the president, paying Melania Trump $40 million for a film about her—and ponying up funds, or a plane, supposedly for Trump’s presidential library, that could benefit Trump himself.
We failed, though, to consider that the president might simply force the US government, i.e. us taxpayers, to straight-up pay him hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the offense of investigating him for crimes.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that Trump “is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him.” Those are DOJ probes into connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian intelligence activities intended to help him win that election, and Trump’s alleged violation of the Espionage Act, and other laws, by evading Justice Department efforts to recover highly classified documents that Trump lifted from the White House when he left office in 2021, some of which he apparently stored in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom.
The Mar-a-Lago case, which included a 2022 FBI raid of that property that Trump takes particular exception to, resulted in Trump’s 2023 indictment on dozens of counts. The case was later thrown out on a technicality by infamously pro-Trump Judge Aileen Cannon, a ruling that DOJ was appealing when Trump’s election effectively ended the case.
Whether Trump will get his payout is officially up to DOJ’s Deputy Attorney General, or the Associate Attorney General who oversees the agency’s civil division. Those jobs are held respectively by Todd Blanche, a former Trump lawyer who represented Trump on the Mar-a-Lago case, and Stanley Woodward, who represented a Trump co-defendant in that case, along with various current Trump aides.
The Times story requires little elaboration. It quotes an ethics professor, Bennett Gershman, of Pace University, who said, “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”
But it’s worth noting that Trump is reportedly demanding a massive personal payment from the government he oversees after enacting legislation that slashed funding for Medicaid benefits and food stamps that benefit the poorest Americans. Meanwhile his administration is imposing legally questionable reductions in congressionally-approved funding for medical research and various other federal programs.
This year, amid a steady stream of reports on Trump and his family’s efforts to profit from his presidency, the White House has affected indignation, asserting that the presidency is actually costing Trump money.
“I think it’s frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a May 9 media briefing. “He left a life of luxury and a life of running a very successful real estate empire for public service, not just once but twice.”
Asked Tuesday if Leavitt stood by that statement, the White House press office referred questions to the Justice Department and Trump’s personal attorneys, adding: “This is not a request for the WH.”
