(AFP) – US President Donald Trump addressed reports Tuesday that he was seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from his own Justice Department, saying it would be “awfully strange” to effectively pay himself. The New York Times reported that lawyers for Trump were demanding around $230 million in compensation for federal investigations into him before he was elected president for a second time.
“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 told reporters in the Oval Office. “That decision would have to go across my desk. And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself…. But I was damaged very greatly.” He later said that he did “not know the numbers.”
Trump has launched a series of legal cases against media firms and other organizations he accuses of bias against him, in some cases winning huge sums. But a situation in which a US president seeks compensation from the very government he heads has “no parallel in American history,” the Times said, adding that it also threw up major ethical conflicts. One of Trump’s former lawyers, Todd Blanche, is now the deputy US attorney general at the Justice Department.
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.” These included the investigation into alleged collusion between Trump’s 2016 election campaign and Russia, and the “weaponization” of the US justice system by then-president Joe Biden, the spokesman said.
Trump faced a series of federal investigations after his first presidency into the alleged mishandling of classified material and attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election that Biden won. They were abandoned when Trump was reelected last year. Trump has also been convicted of 34 felonies related to hush money payments to a porn star in a case in New York State.
© 2024 AFP
