Trump Weaponizes His Own Justice Department to Erase the $83 Million He Owes E. Jean Carroll

Making the Taxpayers Pay for His Defamation

On July 28, 2026, Trump and the U.S. Department of Justice jointly asked the Supreme Court to erase the $83 million a Manhattan jury ordered him to pay E. Jean Carroll for defamation. The legal theory is as brazen as it is revealing: because Trump made the defamatory statements about Carroll in 2019, while he was president, the government argues he is entitled to absolute immunity — and that under the Westfall Act, the United States itself should be substituted as the defendant.

Read that plainly. Trump’s own Justice Department, now led by Todd Blanche — the man who was Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney before being installed atop DOJ — is arguing that the American taxpayer should replace Trump as the party liable for his lies about a woman a jury found he sexually abused. If the gambit succeeds, the United States absorbs the case, sovereign immunity kicks in, and Carroll collects nothing.

What Trump Actually Said, and What a Jury Found

Carroll, an advice columnist, said in 2019 that Trump raped her in a department-store dressing room in the mid-1990s. Trump responded, as president, by calling her a liar, saying she was “not my type,” and claiming she made the story up to sell a book. Carroll sued for defamation. In a separate case, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming her and awarded her $5 million. In January 2024, a second jury — considering the 2019 presidential statements — awarded her $83.3 million.

These are not contested political opinions. They are findings of fact by two juries: that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll and then defamed her when she said so. The $83 million judgment is what a jury decided those lies were worth.

Immunity Metastasizes

The filing leans directly on the Supreme Court’s own 2024 handiwork. In Trump v. United States, the Court invented sweeping immunity for a president’s “official acts,” shielding Trump from criminal prosecution over January 6. Trump’s lawyers now argue that same immunity reaches back to swallow a civil defamation judgment — that smearing a private citizen who accused him of rape was somehow part of the job of being president.

This is exactly the metastasis critics warned of. Immunity conceived to protect the office is being wielded to protect the man, and to expand outward from criminal prosecution into civil liability for personal, self-serving lies. It is Trump’s second trip to the Supreme Court in this saga: in June 2026, the justices declined to hear his appeal of the earlier $5 million verdict. Now he is back, with the full institutional weight of the Justice Department behind him, asking the Court to finish the job.

The Corruption Is the Point

Two things are happening at once, and both are corrupt. First, the Justice Department — an institution meant to serve the public, not the president personally — is being spent down as Trump’s private law firm, deploying government lawyers and the Westfall Act to make a citizen’s sexual-abuse verdict disappear. Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, put the stakes bluntly in an earlier brief: “If there were ever a case where immunity does not shield a president’s speech, this one is it.”

Second, the maneuver would transfer the cost of Trump’s conduct onto the very taxpayers he governs. He defamed her; the public would pay — or rather, the public would ensure she is paid nothing. It is a perfect distillation of the Trump theory of power: the presidency exists to shield him from the consequences of his own behavior, the Justice Department exists to execute that shield, and the law is whatever gets him out of the bill.