Donald Trump is a skilled extortionist. Since winning the 2024 presidential election, he has secured $16 million from Paramount to settle a baseless lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris; pocketed another $16 million from ABC after suing the company for defamation; and scooped up almost $60 million combined from the tech giants Meta, Alphabet, and X to resolve lawsuits over his social-media bans following the insurrection on January 6, 2021. Now he is extorting a new target: the federal government itself.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Trump has filed paperwork claiming that the Justice Department owes him roughly $230 million in taxpayer funds—damages that he claims are due to him in compensation for the federal investigations into his conduct

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