Trump's favorite judge's rulings undercut president's $230 million refund demand: reporter

President Donald Trump is seeking $230 million in restitution for the crimes he was charged with by the Justice Department, according to a New York Times report on Tuesday. However, that conflicts with the Florida ruling from Judge Aileen Cannon, one justice reporter said Wednesday.

MSNBC's Ken Dilanian explained that the White House has confirmed the demands, though not the specific number.

"They've made some claims, two separate claims, one involving the Russia investigation and one involving the Mar-a-Lago investigation," he said, describing the classified documents case in the latter. "In both cases, Donald Trump is claiming that the government violated his rights and his privacy. And that's the first thing here is that there is just no evidence that that happened."

Dilanian said that both were "properly predicated" and had "been reviewed by independent fact finders, and they've been found to have been done, carried out properly."

In the case involving the classified documents Trump took from the White House and refused to return,

"And in the case of Mar-a-Lago judge Aileen Cannon, who ruled in favor of Donald Trump on some very controversial issues, never ruled that the search of his Mar-a-Lago compound was improper or violated his rights," he noted.

Cannon argued that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith was improper because she believed that the statute says an attorney general cannot appoint such a counsel because he wasn't working at the Justice Department at the time he was appointed.

"There's just no evidence to support these claims," said Dilanian. "The other issue, of course, is who's going to decide whether the claim should be paid out and how much by the Justice Department regulation. It's the deputy attorney general, who's Todd Blanche, who represented Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago case and other criminal cases."

Meanwhile, the deputy, the head of the DOJ civil division, is Stanley Woodward, who represented Trump's co-defendants in that same case, he recalled.

"But, of course, Donald Trump is making clear in some new comments that they're not really the deciders here. He's the decider," the reporter continued.

Dilanian closed by saying that the ordeal "underscores how the idea thatthe U.S. government can engage inindependent fact finding and dothings separate from what Donald Trump wants appears tobe a very tenuous idea, if notout the window at this moment."