DOJ Potentially Paying Trump $230 Million Would Be an Uncommonly Open Form of a Common Scandal

According to a report in the New York Times by Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager, Donald Trump filed two administrative claims in 2023 and 2024 threatening to sue the Justice Department and asking for compensation of as much as $230 million over alleged violations of his rights in the Russiagate probe (which led to no charges against him) and the 2023 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago (which led to his indictment). The story quotes Trump mentioning the claims last week: “I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, I’m sort of suing myself. . . . It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit that was very strong, very powerful.” Asked about it yesterday, Trump didn’t deny the story but responded:

“All I know is they would owe me a lot of money, but I’m not looking for money,” Trump told reporters, adding that if he did get a payment, “any money that I would get, I would give to charity.” “It’s interesting because I’m the one that makes a decision. And, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk,” he said. “It’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”

He’s right about the irregularity of this, and he really ought to either abandon the claims or, at a minimum, abandon any demand for personal compensation. The Times says that the claims involve “potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department,” but that understates the case: even if the DOJ was run by people of unimpeachable integrity with no personal relationship with the president, its senior leadership still knows perfectly well that Trump hired them and can fire them, and that they answer to Trump and are obligated to do so.

Although the legal merits of a lawsuit in this situation may be dubious, it’s not necessarily unethical for Trump to have filed these claims. He was a private citizen at the time, after all. But signing off on a settlement that raids the federal treasury to pay the president would be scandalous. It’s actually a more common variety of scandal than you might think, although in true Trumpian fashion, it would be unusually open in its corruption. There’s a long and dolorous history of government law offices from the DOJ on down to local governments acting in collusive fashion to give money to friends and allies that could not get through a legislature as an appropriation, or to agree to consent decrees and other court orders that bind the government in ways that could not get through a legislature as laws. That may not be as openly unethical a practice as literally forking over taxpayer cash to the guy running the government, but it’s really just a smoother way of abusing the adversarial legal system, whose basic premise is that one side isn’t throwing the game. And it’s one that the activist left has perfected over the years. Paying Trump $230 million would stink on ice — and even the possibility of that happening should make us think more skeptically about other forms of collusive settlements.