Trump Helps His Crony to Loot Taxpayers By Requiring DOJ Loyalists to Hand Over Millions to Settle a Bogus Lawsuit

Donald Trump’s most direct attempt to loot the federal Treasury is to file a lawsuit against the U.S. government that will be settled by Justice Department officials directly taking his orders—allowing him to order them to pay himself millions. Trump’s cronies and supporters are already getting in on this racket for themselves.

The Associated Press reports:

The Justice Department has settled for roughly $1.2 million a lawsuit from Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser to President Donald Trump who pleaded guilty during the Republican’s first term to lying to the FBI about his conversations with a top Russian diplomat and was later pardoned.

Court papers filed Wednesday do not reveal the settlement amount, but a person familiar with the matter, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to disclose nonpublic information, confirmed the total as about $1.2 million.

The settlement resolves a 2023 lawsuit in which Flynn sought at least $50 million and asserted that the criminal case against him amounted to a malicious prosecution. It also represents a stark turnabout in position for a Justice Department that during the Biden administration had pressed a judge to dismiss Flynn’s complaint. Attorney General Pam Bondi, a former personal lawyer for the president, has openly criticized the Russia investigation in which Flynn was charged and the Justice Department in the last year has opened investigations into former officials who participated in that inquiry….

Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI when he said he had not discussed with the Russian envoy, Sergey Kislyak, sanctions that the outgoing Obama administration had just imposed on Russia for election interference. During that conversation, Flynn advised that Russia be “even-keeled” in response to the punitive measures and assured him “we can have a better conversation” about relations between the countries after Trump became president.

Flynn admitted to lying, and the facts of the case are not under dispute. But as with Trump’s lawsuit, the government’s lawyers are not trying to protect our money from being siphoned off through frivolous lawsuits. They are actively cooperating with the looting.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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