Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Leah Litman: Great to be back.
He’s now seeking that money as president. One of the people who decides the fate of these claims is Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who just happens to be Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer.
Can you quickly catch us up on the basic legal ins and outs of this?
So I guess first, just quickly by way of background, the demands that he made—so federal law creates kind of an elaborate structure and process for suing the federal government when they violate your rights. There’s this background legal principle that the federal government is immune unless they have consented to being sued.
So that’s the process that Donald Trump began in 2023–2024, writing this demand letter to the Department of Justice.
Litman: Exactly. This is a prerequisite to filing suit. You’re right. At this stage, it is the federal government—and specifically his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, as well as the former lawyer for one of his co-defendants in the obstruction of justice classified documents case—who have the positions at the Department of Justice that allow them to decide whether to fork over the money that has been requested as part of these demand letters.
There are a bunch of procedural obstacles and defenses that the United States can invoke and point to as a basis for not handing over the money that is being requested. And Donald Trump, again, just seems to want to bypass all of this and say, well, it’s my department, so I can effectively order them to just hand over the money that I have requested of them because I, Donald Trump, am the embodiment of the executive branch, and I am basically ordering my left arm to give my right arm several hundred millions of dollars.
Sargent: Several hundred million dollars of our money, Leah.
I mean, we all knew he and his family have been trying to profit off of the presidency. And this just looks like they have decided, why even bother to do it through an intermediary? Why not just straight up demand, ‘Pay me the money.’
Litman: Not in my view. The domestic emoluments clause is a provision in the Constitution that basically prevents the president from accepting emoluments, profits, gifts from state and local governments, you know, while they hold office under the United States. This is a demand for several hundreds of millions of dollars that would come from taxpayer money, and that includes state and local governments. So this, in my view, is kind of obvious domestic emoluments clause violation, and he just thinks he can get away with it.
Litman: Yes. You know, there was litigation during the first Trump administration attempting to enforce the domestic and foreign emoluments clauses. You know, in those cases, which frankly now seem quaint in hindsight, the allegation was that his stake in his hotels and restaurants effectively allowed him to get money aside from his salary from both foreign governments and state and local governments. And now, again, he’s just discarding the intermediary that was his businesses and just raiding the treasury and treating all of our money as his personal piggy bank.
He’s just completely stripping that out of the way and reaching into the Treasury and grabbing the money himself.
Sargent: Well, the underlying claims Trump is making here are also baloney. He wasn’t victimized by the Russia investigation or by the indictment of him for stealing state secrets. There was very strong evidence that he committed crimes. A judge found probable cause of this. But the point is that it’s even more wildly corrupt for him to seek this money as the president. It’s so conflicted, it’s hard to imagine. I want to read one more line from the letter from Raskin. “If your claims had any merit, you would have taken them to court by now and litigated them publicly. Instead, you waited until you became president and installed your handpicked loyalists at DOJ knowing that you could instruct them to co-sign your demand in secret behind closed doors.” I mean, I wish Democrats talked like that all the time, just calling the criming out for what it is, criming.
That is not a violation of his rights. They obtained judicial permission for doing so, and the underlying legal claims are baseless. The fact that, as Raskin outlines, he has apparently waited to move forward further with this demand until he installed his former personal lawyers and loyalists in the positions that would determine whether to settle these claims and hand him the money is evidence of corrupt motive.
Sargent: Right. And that’s a reference to what Trump himself said about this to reporters. So folks, please listen to this.
Sargent: So Leah, in addition to your point that he seems to understand that this looks really bad. I think there’s something else we need to point out, which is that when he says this is his decision, he’s accidentally admitting that he’s appropriating for himself the power to command his deputy attorney general Todd Blanche to give him the $230 million if he says so. I found that just dumbfounding. He just said it straight out. You know, I have the power to tell him to do this. Am I wrong?
They are merely exercising your whims and your view of executive power and how you think federal law should be executed. And we have insisted that you have the authority to remove all of these individuals precisely to ensure that they do your bidding. And they have emphasized that this is especially true when it comes to the Department of Justice, which they insist on treating as an arm of the president.
Sargent: Well, I’m hopeful that we can get inside this process a little more. Raskin’s letter, which was written with oversight committees, ranking Democrat Robert Garcia demands any and all internal communications between Trump, his lawyers and Justice Department officials discussing Trump’s effort to get his hands on this booty, basically. That includes Deputy AG Todd Blanche. So if Trump and Blanche communicated about this, it would potentially be in a paper trail or if other officials went back and forth on it, that would be in a paper trail. And Raskin also asks in the letter for all DOJ analysis of the situation. Now, Leah, I don’t think the White House and DOJ will turn this over. And of course, no Republican will ask for any of this, of course. But if Democrats win the House, they could use subpoena power to pursue it. Can you explain why it’s so essential to get that material and what it could yield?
Sargent: Yeah, you could have a situation where these internal communications show that Trump essentially directed his former personal attorney to hand over the money.
Sargent: Exactly. And it’s essential we get that. So just as a quick aside, Raskin’s letter also says Trump committed a statutory violation here as well, or he’s trying to. Can you give us a quick glimpse of that?
Sargent: It’s all pretty appalling. Well, OK, so so back to the Supreme Court in a very big sense the Supreme Court has landed us in this situation writ large, right?
And they have insisted the Constitution requires this arrangement, and they have insisted this is awesome and this is a great way of structuring government. And of course, we are seeing it is a recipe for corruption. It is a recipe for autocracy. Because if you tell this president, ‘Yeah, the Department of Justice, you just own all of that and can control and direct it,’ you know, surprise, surprise—he’s going to use it for corrupt ends.
So the idea that all executive officers are just serving at the arm of the president and the president has to have that degree of control over offices like DOJ was always a recipe for disaster, and we are just seeing that materialize in real time.
Sargent: I just want to be sure I understand this correctly. He’s saying that his rights were violated by the federal government because they were trying to hold him accountable to crimes which a judge said there was probable cause he committed.
Sargent: That can’t be true. No, seriously it’s like a kid. It’s it doesn’t compute.
Well, guess what provision the Supreme Court has grounded this insane theory of executive power in? The provision in the Constitution that directs the president to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. They have insisted that that power is what allows the president to control everyone in the executive branch, fire people he doesn’t agree with, and have immunity and direct DOJ.
It’s just nuts.
They think if Trump succeeds, they’re succeeding because it gets you and me angry. Basically, what this really gets at is Trump is kind of reinventing the presidency as a bribe delivery system. Like, in so many ways, he’s created these new avenues for big institutions to channel money in the direction that Trump wants them to, right?
And then look at someone like Todd Blanche. I think Marcy Wheeler has pointed this out, which is that Todd Blanche could be legally vulnerable, right? He’s, as deputy AG, potentially, you know, committing his own criminal violations in the decisions that he’s making in all sorts of ways. And so could a guy like that possibly say no when Trump says, ‘Hand me two hundred thirty million dollars’?
Litman: Exactly. When you make everyone’s future, their career, their liberty depend on the whims and decisions of one person, that is a recipe for abuses of power, which we are seeing because even if, you know, Deputy A.G. Blanche thinks, well, look what I am doing that might violate it, violate a ton of federal laws. You know, he might be thinking, well, Donald Trump will pardon me. And so who cares? As long as I remain on this guy’s good side, I basically have a get out of jail free card.
Litman: Yep. Yeah.
Litman: Yeah they have completely collapsed the distinction between Donald Trump’s private interests and the public interests and the nation’s interest and you can see this in myriad ways you know when Donald Trump refers to the weaponization of the Department of Justice all he’s talking about is efforts to enforce the law against him but all of a sudden that becomes this big principle that is about our national interest because he was legally vulnerable and he faced a risk of liability.
Litman: You know, the fact that I can’t say no is the biggest indictment of how much they have subverted and just, you know, abused the federal government. I don’t know. I really don’t. I think there is a possibility that this is the sort of thing where enough people understand this is straight up theft. And it can’t be that this guy, you know, who ran on this platform of, I’m going to make all of your lives, you know, easier by reducing costs and reducing taxes. Now he gets to extract this huge cost from all of us. mean, that just cannot be. And I would hope that that would be something that could break through to enough people, even if not to MAGA, to enough independents or people who are not likely to vote or low information voters to start to register in ways that make the Republican Party unwilling to go along with this.
Litman: Thanks for having me.
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