House speaker tiptoes around Trump's alleged taxpayer shakedown

On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to oppose President Donald Trump's demand that the Department of Justice pay him $230 million in restitution for the criminal charges he faced, instead choosing to play dumb on the issue rather than criticize Dear Leader.

Reporters asked Johnson whether he is "comfortable" with the fact that Trump is seeking a nearly quarter-billion in taxpayer dollars from the Department of Justice.

"I don’t know the details about that. I just read it. I didn't talk to him about that," Johnson said at a news conference on Capitol Hill. "I know that he believes he’s owed that reimbursement. From what I heard yesterday, if he receives it he's going to consider giving it to charity."

Johnson then had the temerity to make Trump the victim in this situation, after Democrats criticized Trump's attempt to take hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for his own personal gain.

"We're for the rule of law, we're for what is just and right, and it's just absurd that, as has been noted several times this morning, they attack him for everything he does. It doesn't matter what it is," Johnson said.

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Yes, how dare anyone criticize Trump for taking nearly a quarter-billion dollars from taxpayers for himself—while at the same time saying the government doesn’t have enough money for things like health care and food stamps for the poorest among us. 

We all know that you can’t trust that he’d give the money to charity.

Conveniently, the hideously tacky ballroom he’s demolishing the White House’s East Wing to build is expected to cost $250 million. Make of that what you will. 

On top of all that, Trump in no way, shape, or form deserves a single cent in restitution for the criminal cases and investigations he faced.

Trump would almost certainly have been convicted in the classified documents case he faced had it not been for the Trump-appointed judge who delayed the case for months before dismissing it on shaky legal ground, and the Supreme Court he stacked with his stooges who then ruled that Trump basically had immunity for every action he took as president. 

And the Russia investigation he says he is owed money for found that there were “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” according to now-former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

Even more absurd is the $230 million figure itself. 

Trump paid his lawyers in those cases with money from donors, not his own pocket—so it’s not like he had any monetary loss. And now that he is president, sadly for this country and its future, the reputational harm argument is equally bullshit. 

Even Trump admitted the situation makes him look bad in a rare moment of self awareness—though clearly not enough for him to drop the horrific idea.

“I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, I’m sort of suing myself,” Trump said last week. “I don’t know, how do you settle the lawsuit, I’ll say give me X dollars, and I don’t know what to do with the lawsuit. … It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit that was very strong, very powerful.”

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Sadly for all of us, as my brilliant colleague Lisa Needham wrote on Tuesday, the very people in the DOJ who have the power to approve the $230 million payout Trump is corruptly demanding are his own personal criminal defense attorneys, so it’s unlikely they’d say no to their client/Dear Leader. 

As Needham wrote:

[Trump’s] claims can be approved by the deputy attorney general, who happens to be Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s many former personal lawyers. Blanche is such a Trump fanboy that he thinks left-wing protesters should be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. He’s so ethically compromised that he doesn’t appear to have recused himself from a DOJ brief filed on Trump’s behalf in one of his ceaseless attempts to make his 34 felony convictions go away.

“The president is openly attempting to rob American taxpayers to the tune of $230 MILLION. And yet he won’t help everyday Americans with their healthcare premiums or grocery bills. It’s one of the most brazen abuses of power in history. Will any Republican push back against this corruption?” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) wrote on X.

If Johnson’s response is any indication, the answer to Cleaver’s question is a resounding “no.”

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