The $230 million claim
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The $230 million claim is the compensation demand a sitting American president made against his own Justice Department in October 2025, and the occasion for one of the few times John Kiriakou checks a legal question on air by naming the person he telephoned.

The demand

The host set it out as an extortion racket run against the government by its own head, the president telling the department that had charged him during the previous administration that he wanted his money back and wanted to be made whole. "He's shaking down his own DOJ for a quarter of a billion dollars."

The call

Kiriakou's contribution is the legal check. "When I saw that he was asking to be reimbursed $230 million, I called Bruce Fein, our friend and former deputy attorney general."

Fein is not an incidental acquaintance: he is Kiriakou's longtime attorney, a constitutional lawyer who served as deputy attorney general under Reagan, and a co-author on a long-planned book about the agency's record. If anyone was going to tell Kiriakou the demand was legally frivolous, it was him.

He did not. "And Bruce said: oh, yeah, he can do that."

The statute

The mechanism Fein described, in Kiriakou's paraphrase, is old and narrow. "There's this obscure federal law that goes back to the nineteenth century that says that if you're the victim of a vindictive prosecution, you can sue the Justice Department and they have to reimburse you."

The objection the two men then raised is not legal but structural, and neither resolves it: "but he's the president." A claim of vindictive prosecution brought by the person who now controls the department that would pay it collapses the adversarial premise the statute assumes.

The other question

Kiriakou's remaining objection was about appetite rather than authority. "Not to mention, at some point, when is enough enough? I mean, you've grifted so much already. You've made billions of dollars. You never were a billionaire before you became president, but now you are."

The passage is characteristic of how Kiriakou handles legal questions in public. He does not guess, does not assert, and does not pretend the answer he got was the one he wanted; he reports the call and lets the answer stand.

See also

- Bruce Fein
- Donald Trump
- John Kiriakou
