Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro on Saturday slammed President Trump’s effort to receive a $230 million payment from the Department of Justice (DOJ) as compensation for the various federal probes into his conduct.
“I think that it’s rife with conflicts of interest,” Shapiro told NewsNation’s Batya Ungar-Sargon.
“I cannot see a world in which that does not end with either a massive number of lawsuits or even an impeachment in the House. That is just a bad strategy,” he added.
Trump has alleged that past DOJ investigations into his conduct were “politically motivated” and damaged his reputation.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney, would be one of the people responsible for signing off on the settlement, which the president has said he would donate to charity.
“To pretend that it’s not a conflict of interest, for the president to ask the DOJ that he appointed to maybe sign him a check for $230 million, even if it’s going to go to charity, that obviously raises significant conflicts of interest that I think would be impossible to get around in sort of any legal context,” Shapiro said.
GOP senators and other lawmakers have also raised significant concerns over the effort.
“At the very least, it’s horrible timing, given that we’re in a shutdown,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters earlier this week.
“I got a lot of optics concerns, and I just don’t know if there’s precedent for it. There doesn’t seem to be,” he added.
He also urged DOJ officials to “follow the rules” when it comes to approving any funds to be handed over to Trump.
“If there’s precedent, that’s the beginning of the discussion,” Tillis later said Thursday. “If there isn’t precedent for this sort of thing, I don’t think this is the time to establish it.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) also said the effort sounds “very irregular.”
House Democrats said they plan to investigate Trump’s push to receive damages and described it as “a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional effort to steal $230 million from the American people.”
Reps. Jamie Raskin (Md.) and Robert Garcia (Calif.), the top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees, wrote a letter to the president highlighting the bad timing of Trump’s push for a $230 million settlement.
“You waited until you became President and installed your handpicked loyalists at DOJ, knowing that you could instruct them to co-sign your demand notes in secret behind closed doors, and then you could present the notes to the U.S. Treasury for cold hard cash courtesy of the American taxpayer,” the lawmakers wrote.
They added, “That isn’t justice, it is theft.”
Source: The Hill