Newsmax judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano argued that President Donald Trump’s reported demand that the Justice Department pay him $230 million was a “nonstarter.”
Napolitano responded to the reports after Trump confirmed on Tuesday that he was seeking a settlement from his Justice Department related to investigations into Russia’s election meddling and classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago.
“If you were to ask me how this has been treated by history, I would tell you, there is no historical paradigm,” the analyst laughed. “This has never happened before. A president of the United States suing his own Justice Department for what he says a previous Justice Department did to him while he was a private citizen.”
“Is there a cause of action?” he continued. “The federal government has made it very difficult for anyone to sue it, but there is something called the Federal Tort Claims Act.”
Napolitano insisted there was “no basis for such a cause of action,” even if the government did not succeed in convicting Trump.
“We don’t have loser pays in the United States,” he said. “If we did that, it would be far fewer federal prosecutions if the feds had to pay the legal fees of people that they prosecuted and who were acquitted.”
Napolitano also noted that Trump’s former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, was now serving as the deputy attorney general.
“Doesn’t he have a conflict of interest here in deciding whether or not to authorize this check for $230 million?” he asked. “Because it would be his legal fees. So the short answer is yes, he does.”
“If his name were Donald Jones instead of Donald Trump, nonstarter,” he added. “No one is entitled to legal fees for defending themselves in a case where there’s been a decision adverse to the government. As long as the government’s behavior was in good faith.”
Napolitano argued that it was “almost inconceivable” that Trump’s legal team could show that “the government’s behavior was not in good faith, that there was no legal basis for the Mar-a-Lago raid.”
