Ben Shapiro says there are “an enormous number of serious conflicts” with Trump demanding the Department of Justice pay him $230 million
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From the October 22, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Now in the turnabout is fair play category is a report that I think — this is foolhardy. Again, I think that the Republicans, you always got to be careful of overconfidence, sort of leading you down the primrose path into defeat. Apparently, according to The New York Times, President Trump is demanding the Justice Department pay him $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior department officials who defended him or those in his orbit. So this is certainly an ethics conflict because many of the people in the Justice Department were appointed by the president, who is now asking them to apparently reimburse him for legal fees during the course of the last several years. Those legal fees, by the way, are not paid by the lawyers. If you wanted to go ahead and sue the lawyers or go after the lawyers, that makes sense. If he wants to make the American people pay the legal bills, that seems to be a bit of a different story.
Apparently, President Trump submitted complaints through an administrative claim process that is often the precursor to lawsuits. The first claim lodged in late 2023 seeks damages for a number of purported violations of his rights, including the FBI and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 campaign. President Trump did say that he would give any of that money to charity. He said, I'm the one that makes the decision. That decision would have to go across my desk. It's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself. I mean, I don't even understand how this would work, frankly, on a sort of practical level. The conflicts are so obvious. None of this is to say that the federal law enforcement structure was correct for targeting President Trump. They clearly were not. But I'm not sure the solution to that is the president, who presides over the DOJ, asking the DOJ to reimburse him for his legal bills. That that seems to me fraught with an enormous number of serious conflicts.