(WASHINGTON) — Top House Democrats asked President Donald Trump on Thursday to provide documents — including correspondence between his lawyers and his Justice Department — as they investigate his demand for the DOJ to pay roughly $230 million as a settlement for investigations he faced during the Biden administration and in his first term in office.
Reps. Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia, the ranking members on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, respectively, sent a letter directly to Trump requesting that he provide documents and information to their committees.
“In remarks to the press this week, you described a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional effort to steal $230 million from the American people,”Raskin and Garcia wrote in their letter. “Your plan to have your obedient underlings at the Department of Justice (DOJ) instruct the U.S. Treasury to pay you, personally, hundreds of millions of dollars–especially at a time when most Americans are struggling to pay rent, put food on the table, and afford health care–is an outrageous and shocking attempt to shake down the American people.”
The committees want Trump to provide “all administrative claims filed by you on your legal representation under Federal Torts Claims Act” as well as “all correspondence between you or your legal representatives and any DOJ official.”
The Democrats also want “all DOJ memoranda, legal analyses, or recommendations shared with you and your legal representative, or any White House official.”
The settlement negotiations with DOJ stem from two separate administrative claims attorneys for Trump submitted while he was out of office in 2023 and 2024. One sought damages over the investigation he and some in his orbit faced surrounding ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government.
The second claim related to accusations that he was prosecuted maliciously by then-special counsel Jack Smith and that his privacy rights were violated when the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents in August of 2022.
Those claims would likely first need sign-off from top officials in the DOJ who previously served as Trump’s defense attorneys or otherwise represented his allies.
Trump, asked Tuesday by reporters in the Oval Office about the New York Times’ story that first reported Trump’s demand, said the decision would “go across my desk.”
“It’s interesting, because I’m the one that makes a decision, right?” Trump said. “And you know that decision would have to go across my desk, and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”
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