President Donald Trump is pressing for his Justice Department to pay roughly $230 million as a settlement for investigations he faced during the Biden administration and his first term in office, sources familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC News Tuesday.
The extraordinary arrangement, as first reported by The New York Times, would likely first need sign-off from top officials in the department who previously served as Trump’s defense attorneys or otherwise represented his allies.
The settlement negotiations stem from two separate administrative claims that were submitted by attorneys for Trump while he was out of office in 2023 and 2024. One sought damages over the investigation he and those in his orbit faced surrounding ties his 2016 campaign had to the Russian government.
The second claim, which was previously reported publicly last year, 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.
In an appearance in the Oval Office last week with Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump appeared to allude to the negotiations and the unusual nature of a Justice Department paying out a settlement to the current sitting president.
“I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president I said, ‘I’m sort of suing myself.’ 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,” Trump said. “It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right?”
According to the Justice Manual, any settlement would have to get sign-off from either the deputy attorney general or the associate attorney general.
President Donald Trump speaks as he hosts a Rose Garden Club lunch at the White House in Washington, October 21, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Blanche represented Trump in both the classified documents case and the Jan. 6 case brought by Smith, and the associate attorney general, Stan Woodward, represented Walt Nauta, Trump’s co-defendant in the classified documents case.
Trump pleaded not guilty in both cases before both were dropped following Trump’s reelection, due to a long-standing Justice Department policy barring the prosecution of a sitting president.
Trump, asked Tuesday by reporters in the Oval Office about the New York Times’ story, said regarding the Justice Department, “I don’t even talk to them about it — all I know is that they would owe me a lot of money, but I don’t, I’m not looking for money. I’d give it to charity or something.”
“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. In other words, did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you’re paying yourself in damages? But I was damaged very greatly, and any money that I would get, I would give to charity.”
Asked whether either Blanche or Woodward would be considered conflicted out of signing-off on such a settlement, a DOJ spokesperson told ABC News, “In any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials.”
The department declined to further comment on the status of the negotiations.
