Trump says Justice Department ‘owes’ him damages after federal probes

Lawyers for US President Donald Trump have demanded compensation from the US Justice Department for past inquiries. Photo / Andrew Caballero-Reynolds, AFP

United States President Donald Trump said today that the Department of Justice likely owed him damages, after a report that he was seeking millions of dollars in compensation for past investigations.

The New York Times reported that lawyers for the Republican were demanding around US$230 million ($400m) 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.

“But I was damaged very greatly.”

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”.

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, the spokesman said.

But a situation in which a US President seeks compensation from the very Government he heads has “no parallel in American history”, the New York 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 Department of Justice.

It declined to comment on the status of the claims but rejected suggestions that top officials would be conflicted.

“In any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials,” department spokesman Chad Gilmartin said in a statement to AFP.

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 re-elected last year.

Trump has also been convicted of 34 offences related to hush money payments to a porn star in a case in New York State.

– Agence France-Presse