A Bunch of Dogs, Not Barking
about that $230 million
The New York Times story about Donald Trump supposedly demanding that the Department of Justice give him $230 million gets way more bizarre the longer you look at it. The first thing to notice, today, is that the Times didn’t follow up its October 21 story on October 22. They supposedly caught the President of the United States trying to force the federal government to transfer a couple hundred million dollars into his personal bank account, but that story doesn’t have legs at all and it wasn’t worth further coverage. In fact, while there were idiotic opinion pieces all over the place, no one advanced the story on the second day after it landed it print.
The President of the United States is personally trying to force the transfer of a huge sum of cash from the Treasury to his personal bank accounts, a massive scandal that’s being described as impeachable behavior, followed by
Silence
But one organization had sources in the DOJ that talked to them, and look what Axios came up with yesterday (non-paywalled version here):
Nobody’s ever talked about it, it’s like it doesn’t even exist.
Now, into the really strange stuff. The Times covered the story about the claims on October 21 in the language of reporters breaking huge news, uncovering deep secrets from their anonymous sources deep inside the government. It can now be revealed that Donald Trump filed claims against the federal government in 2023 and 2024, gasp! Here’s the lede: “President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter…”
See, people inside government, speaking out to reveal something that wasn’t known.
But here’s the problem:
It’s recycled. In October of 2025, the New York Times “broke” a story that everybody already knew about, or at least knew a good part of, in 2024. In fact, the Times posted one the claims — the $100 million claim about the Mar-a-Lago raid that was JUST REVEALED BY SECRET SOURCES INSIDE THE GOVERNMENT — on its website in 2024:
Here’s the whole 2024 claim as a PDF file:
This doesn’t strike me as a particularly serious $100 million tort claim. Does anyone at the New York Times have access to the website of the New York Times?
I can’t find Trump’s 2023 tort claim online, but I’ll keep trying to get it.
The 2024 claim over the Mar-a-Lago raid was filed by this lawyer:
Daniel Epstein is now a vice-president at America First Legal. The address given on the claim for HRE Legal Group is the address of a virtual office, widely used by many organizations.
It’s unlikely that the successful negotiation of a nine-figure claim against the federal government will come from a one-man shop working out of a virtual office.
But it’s also not clear that the small firm that filed Trump’s 2024 claim still exists, with Epstein now at America First Legal. HRE Group PLLC is registered as a corporate entity with the District of Columbia at a different address, and the LLC is listed as active:
However, that address now appears to host other organizations, but not anything called HRE Group PLLC. If anyone in D.C. wants to stop by this office and look for HRE Group or Daniel Epstein, let me know what you find. Be polite to the receptionist.
So the law firm that filed Trump’s 2024 claim no longer appears to be active, and the lawyer who filed the claim has moved on to a legal non-profit that works on policy matters in support of Trump administration policy priorities, and Trump filed a $100 million claim not with a major law firm but with a small firm with a virtual office. None of that suggests ongoing negotiations at a high level that might lead to a nine-figure payout, with Axios reporting that sources in the government say that no one has been discussing the claims.
By email, I’ve asked Daniel Epstein if he regards the Trump claims as open matters that are still being negotiated. I’ll post his answer if I get one.
But this is all much stranger than any of the reporting in the New York Times suggests. It looks to me like one lawyer without a powerhouse firm behind him typed up a letter demanding that the government give his client a nine-figure sum of money, and the government just ignored him. I don’t know that this story won’t develop into something real, but I do very much doubt it. My guess is that the story about Trump trying to make the government give him $230 million is our current Outrage of the Week, and it’ll be forgotten by Monday morning. We’ll see. Meanwhile, OUTRAGE OUTRAGE OUTRAGE:
He’s ostentatiously performing dictatorial power, which explains why he hasn’t succeeded in getting the money and no one is being prevented at all from writing about it! Tedious, but on-brand.
If the goal is to "inform" then the story is a miserable failure.
If the goal is to give Trump haters yet another "reason" to hate Trump, then the subscribers are getting what they are paying for.
Monday is generous, my money is no mention in the Sunday paper.
Rush Limbaugh used to call this the "drive by media" It has gotten worse.
anyone who has been unjustly abused by US gov hammer agency under FJB's Stalinist rule, as PDJT and his family have been, should absolutely sue.