Trump says DOJ owes money in compensation for past probes

US President Donald Trump has said 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 on Tuesday 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.

"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."

One for the ages

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.

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.

The Times said the other complaint seeks damages related to the long-concluded Trump-Russia investigation, which continues to infuriate the president.

Trump has also been convicted of 34 felonies related to hush money payments to an adult actress in a case in New York State.

___

Source: TRT