The $230 Million Theft in Broad Daylight
Which is more audacious? The Louvre jewels heist or Trump’s taxpayer swindle
The Louvre heist earlier this week grabbed headlines for the brazen theft in broad daylight of French crown jewels valued at over $100 million. Not to be outdone, Donald Trump is hoping to pull off a score of more than twice as much.
$230 million—the amount Donald Trump says the government owes him for its investigations into and two indictments of him—is a lot of money. It would weigh a little over two metric tons and fill roughly 100 heavy satchels, each about 50 pounds. Picture Trump ordering five of his most ingratiating servants—Todd Blanche, Pam Bondi, Ed Martin Jr., Alina Habba, and Lindsey Halligan—to use a furniture lift to break into Fort Knox and haul out one satchel after another.
That would be no more brazen or illegal than what Trump is now proposing: a $230 million swindle of the Department of Justice and the American taxpayer, ostensibly to compensate him for the investigations and the Mar-a-Lago search.
Trump’s scheme quickly collides with a set of well-established legal barriers that leave no doubt he’s not entitled to a penny. His claim, in fact, is laughable. But that doesn’t mean he won’t try to get away with it, applying his familiar mindset: Who’s going to stop me?
A series of laws and doctrines make compensation for having been prosecuted exceedingly rare. That rarity is one reason the principles of federal prosecution put into play so many guardrails against faulty cases, which can devastate defendants even when they prevail. The current Administration has demolished those guardrails, asserting raw power to wield the life-ruining force of prosecution whenever the President feels like it.
The best-known channel for some kind of compensation for vindictive prosecution is the Hyde Amendment. Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde sponsored it as a check on prosecutorial overreach, explaining, “When the government puts an innocent citizen through the ordeal of a criminal trial without justification, the citizen should not be left to bear the financial ruin that follows.”
Trump has no recourse under the Amendment. Not only could he never show that the government’s position was vexatious, frivolous, or in bad faith, the provision also applies only to “prevailing defendants,” which Trump was not. The cases against him were dismissed only after his re-election. Moreover, the award covers only lawyers’ fees and litigation expenses, and no amount of creative accounting could make that figure approach $230 million.
So Trump has turned instead to the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). That statute requires a formal administrative claim, followed by a six-month waiting period for denial. Trump reportedly filed bare-bones papers in 2023 and 2024. Whether they qualified as formal claims is unclear, but irrelevant in light of the many other fatal flaws.
Start with the basics. The FTCA is the narrow statute that allows private citizens to sue the federal government for certain torts—acts like negligence or property damage—committed by government employees acting within the scope of their employment. Trump would need to show that Jack Smith’s team committed a recognized tort under state law—presumably malicious prosecution—and that the government waived immunity for it. But to prove that tort he runs into the same brick wall as with the Hyde Amendment: he must show the proceedings were brought without probable cause, were motivated by malice, and terminated in his favor. No judge short of Aileen Cannon would find Smith acted without probable cause or out of personal malice, and even she couldn’t torture the facts and law enough to hold that the cases ended in Trump’s favor.
And that’s just the beginning. Next comes a second brick wall: sovereign immunity. The government, as sovereign, decides what claims it will permit against itself. It has chosen not to waive immunity for intentional torts. That bar encompasses the tort of malicious prosecution.
Congress carved out an exception for certain abuses of process by investigative officers, but that doesn’t include prosecutors. A long line of decisions from every court to address the issue has held that decisions to investigate or prosecute are immune under the FTCA. It’s a fully settled question of law.
Now we come to Trump’s favorite dance when he’s the defendant: arguing that the acts were committed “within the scope of employment.” If he says Jack Smith acted within the scope, sovereign immunity applies and the government can’t be sued. But, there’s a catch-22. If he says Smith acted outside the scope, the government isn’t liable at all. And while the Court once allowed so-called Bivens suits against rogue government actors, it has made clear those suits are now effectively moribund.
Then there’s the matter of damages. Trump says he’s owed $230 million, a number apparently conjured from the ether. The FTCA allows only actual, compensable loss, not reputational harm, political inconvenience, or “damage to brand.” Even if Trump could prove that his legal bills and lost business were caused by the prosecutions—which he can’t—those aren’t recoverable injuries under the statute. Courts have consistently rejected attempts to convert lawful law enforcement into a tort.
So, with that series of insurmountable hurdles, consider the position of the government official who received Trump’s administrative FTCA claim for $230 million of the public’s money. It would take perhaps fifteen minutes to deny it. Looking at the litigation exposure of the United States, the official would note: the claim might be formally inadequate; the prosecutions had probable cause; there is no evidence of malice; the cases did not terminate in Trump’s favor; the FTCA doesn’t permit recovery for intentional torts; it exempts prosecutorial judgments — even bad ones; it wouldn’t cover acts within the scope of employment; there is no Bivens remedy; and the damages number is fanciful and absurd.
Enter Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. He has another, even more fundamental reason he can’t work on Trump’s claim, much less dole out $230 million of taxpayer money. He was Trump’s defense lawyer in the very proceedings and remains both his loyal servant and subordinate. No ethics counsel would countenance his having anything to do with Trump’s tawdry scheme. The ethics counselor for DOJ’s senior officials would immediately condemn it — that is, if there were an ethics counselor. Bondi conveniently fired him three months ago.
Even if Blanche—operating in the ethics-free zone of the current DOJ—pursued Trump’s claim, he would know beyond any doubt that it’s an entirely illegitimate call on $230 million of the public’s money. To sign off on the scam would be a gross dereliction of his oath of office. It might even constitute a crime: the knowing and willful conversion of U.S. property (18 U.S.C. § 841) and conspiracy against the United States (18 U.S.C. § 371).
Taken alone, the FTCA gambit might look like a phony ploy that Trump will soon abandon. But it fits a now-familiar pattern in his second term: the repurposing of implausible legal mechanisms into instruments of political retaliation and self-enrichment. It’s the same strategy we’ve seen from Trump again and again — flood the system with bad-faith filings, declare vindication when they’re denied, and claim the denial itself proves the system is “rigged.” Each time, the point isn’t to win in court but to erode the legal constraints that should cabin Trump — to make the machinery of government answerable to the man, not the law.
None of this is news to Trump’s lawyers. They know perfectly well that an FTCA claim like this has no conceivable chance of success. The real audience isn’t the court; it’s the political base. The goal is to project victimhood—to reframe criminal accountability as state persecution—and, crucially, to do it using the trappings of legitimate legal process.
The Louvre thieves at least had to break a few locks. Trump’s caper aims to loot the Treasury of hundreds of millions in plain sight, with accomplices wearing DOJ badges instead of masks. The only thing missing is a fleet of getaway mopeds idling outside Main Justice. If someone like Todd Blanche were even to entertain this plainly illegal swindle of taxpayer money, it would be a rank betrayal of the public interest he has sworn to represent.
Talk to you later.
Where the heck are the Congress!?! Literally no one is watching out for us.
Discovery should be enlightening.