Donald Trump is rapidly transforming the presidency into a massive Bribe Delivery System. For convenience’s sake, let’s refer to this going forward as Trump’s presidential “BDS.”

This is underscored by the jarring news that Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him $230 million in compensation related to various federal actions against him. As The New York Times reports, Trump submitted claims in 2023 and 2024 seeking “damages” stemming from the investigation into Russian interference in 2016 and his prosecution for stealing classified documents at the end of his first term.

Now that Trump is president again, he is still demanding those payments, sources told the Times. And one of the officials who would decide the matter is Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—one of Trump’s former personal attorneys.

Ethics experts point out that Trump now appears in a position to command his subordinates to hand him $230 million in taxpayer money. As the Times delicately put it, Trump expects this to happen.

But it gets even worse.

In an interview, Representative Jamie Raskin—who is investigating this as ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee—said his staff’s research indicates that these payments can probably be made confidentially at first, with no immediate public disclosure.

“Our reading is that, even though this is a private settlement, it doesn’t have to be disclosed anywhere until there is an accounting of where all the money has gone at the end of the year,” Raskin told me.

This is because Trump is seeking these payments via an internal DOJ administrative claims process, a spokesperson for House Judiciary Committee Democrats says, which is typically confidential. Though any payments would come out eventually in a later report to Congress, a payment could be made confidentially well before DOJ makes a public disclosure.

“I’m not aware of any reason this would automatically be made public at the time it happened,” says Dan Weiner, a lawyer at the Brennan Center.

It’s hard to fathom how bad this is. Start with the claims themselves: In 2023, Trump sought damages from DOJ from the Russia investigation, which he’s called a “hoax” for years. But while that probe had some serious problems, DOJ’s inspector general

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