Donald Trump is reportedly trying to loot the federal government to the tune of $230 million. That’s how much he’s demanding from the Department of Justice in compensation for past federal probes of his misdeeds, according to a Tuesday report in The New York Times.

The Times’ sources say that before he returned to the White House, Trump filed administrative claims, or formal requests for relief from a government agency, which often precede a lawsuit. One 2023 claim seeks damages for investigations into Russian election interference and ties to the Trump 2016 campaign—another, filed in 2024, for the 2022 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents.

The president reportedly expects to be paid a settlement but, so far, has not gotten his nine-figure payday.

The potential settlement, being for an administrative claim, would not need to be publicly announced, and would simply need the approval of one of two Trump-friendly officials: Todd Blanche, who is the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, or DOJ civil division chief Stanley Woodward Jr., who has represented many of the president’s aides and allies—from Trump’s co-defendant in the classified documents case to participants in the January 6 Capitol attack.

Compensation in such cases is “typically covered by taxpayers,” the Times reports.

Of the unprecedented situation, Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace Law School, told the Times that “the ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”

Trump seemingly acknowledged the abysmal optics of his stickup during a press conference last week: “I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, ‘I’m sort of suing myself. I don’t know. How do you settle the lawsuit?’ I’ll say, ‘Give me X dollars,’ right? And I don’t know what to do with the lawsuit. It’s a great lawsuit, and now I won, it sort of looks bad. I’m suing myself, right? So I don’t know.”

It looks like former CIA Director John Brennan is next up on Trump’s long list of political retribution targets.

As the conservative magazine The Federalist first reported on Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday referred Brennan to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution on the grounds that he “knowingly made false statements” to Congress about Trump’s collusion with Russia during a hearing in May 2023.

Brennan, who led the CIA during an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, has been historically critical of Trump on Russia. Just before his tenure as CIA director ended in 2017, he warned that he didn’t think Trump had “a full appreciation of Russian capabilities, Russia’s intentions and actions that they are undertaking in many parts of the world.”

“Brennan made numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact contradicted by the record established by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and the CIA,” Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan wrote in his letter to the Justice Department on Tuesday.

The committee also added that Brennan “falsely denied that the CIA relied on the discredited Steele dossier in drafting the post-election Intelligence Community Assessment,” “falsely testified when he told the Committee that the CIA opposed including the Steele dossier in the ICA,” and “provided false testimony during a HPSCI hearing in 2017.

“In sum, Brennan’s testimony before the Committee on May 11, 2023, was a brazen attempt to knowingly and willfully testify falsely and fictitiously to material facts. We therefore make this referral for the Department to examine whether any of Brennan’s testimony warrants a charge for the violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001,” Jordan concludes.

Brennan is on his way to join fellow Trump adversaries such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey in a spiteful legal battle with the president.

Republicans are still playing the blame game on the subject of political violence—even as a pardoned January 6 rioter attacks one of their colleagues.

House Speaker Mike Johnson brushed off assassination threats against Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Tuesday, claiming that—despite the wannabe assassin’s conservative politics—the left is still at fault.

When asked directly about the incident during his daily shutdown press conference, Johnson initially said that he was completely unaware of the plot to “eliminate” Jeffries at New York City’s Economic Club Monday.

“Terrible. That’s the first I’ve heard of that. I don’t know anything about it,” Johnson said. “But anybody who threatens to kill any political official, we denounce it, absolutely.”

Christopher Moynihan, a 34-year-old from upstate New York, was arrested Saturday for threatening to kill Jeffries.

Moynihan was convicted in 2022 for participating in the Capitol riot. Video evidence captured him breaking through fences, entering the Capitol, and rifling through documents in the Senate Gallery. During the riot, Moynihan said, “There’s got to be something in here we can fucking use against these scumbags,” according to court documents. Moynihan was also depicted standing behind the Senate well alongside Jacob Chansley, better known as the QAnon Shaman.

He was sentenced to nearly two years in prison in 2023 but was prematurely released, thanks to a blanket pardon from Donald Trump that freed 1,500 January 6 rioters on his first day back in office.

Moynihan is the first pardoned Capitol rioter to be rearrested over alleged political violence, but he’s not the only January 6er to run afoul of the law since they were granted clemency. In February, former Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio was arrested by Capitol police after a woman accused him of attacking her. In May, Zachary Alam was arrested for allegedly breaking into a home in Virginia.

However, given the chance to elaborate on his statement about Moynihan’s recent attack, Johnson chose to........

© New Republic