 "US President Donald Trump. (Reuters file)")
US President Donald Trump has sought compensation worth $230 million from his own Department of Justice as a settlement for investigations he was put under during his predecessor Joe Biden’s presidency.
The New York Times reported that lawyers for the Republican were demanding around $230 million in compensation for federal probes into him before he was elected president for a second time.
“That decision would have to go across my desk. And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when asked about the report.
The settlement negotiations arise from two separate administrative claims filed by Trump’s attorneys while he was out of office in 2023 and 2024. One claim sought damages related to investigations into alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government.
The second claim, first reported publicly last year, alleged that Trump was maliciously prosecuted by then-special counsel Jack Smith and that his privacy rights were violated during the FBI’s August 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents.
Trump added of the Department of Justice that “they probably owe me a lot of money – if I get money from our country, I will do something nice with it like to give it to charity or give it to the White House.”
Trump has launched a series of legal cases against media firms and other organisations he accuses of bias against him, in some cases winning huge sums.
He said it “could be” the case that his legal team had filed a compensation claim, but said that “I don’t know what the numbers are, I don’t even talk to them about it.”
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe Justice Manual says that any settlement claim needs to be signed off on by either the deputy attorney general or the associate attorney general.
In both the above-mentioned cases, Trump pleaded not guilty before the charges were dropped following Trump’s reelection, owing to the DOJ’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team did not directly confirm the New York Times story but told AFP that the president “continues to fight back against all Democrat-led witch hunts.”
With inputs from agencies