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house oversight committee
Emoluments Probe Concludes Trump Used DC Hotel to Enrich Himself, Fleece Taxpayers While President
"Far from expressing contrition for cashing in on the presidency, Donald Trump has made explicit his intent to expand his commodification of federal office if re-elected."
Oct 18, 2024
Democrats on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Friday published a staff report detailing how, while in office, former U.S. President Donald Trump—the 2024 Republican nominee—used his Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. to enrich himself with hundreds of illegal or questionable payments from federal and state officials, job-seekers, and presidential pardon recipients.
The report—titled Room Rates May Vary: How Donald Trump Violated the Constitution by Fleecing Taxpayers With Unlawful and Exorbitant Hotel Charges—was released by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who in 2021 managed Trump's historic second impeachment for inciting the January 6 Capitol insurrection.
"Trump has used the presidency—and his yearslong pursuit of it—as the world's greatest get-rich-quick scheme."
Offering "a glimpse into President Trump's domestic emoluments rackets," the publication accuses the former president of violating the Constitution's Domestic Emoluments Clause "as he used the Secret Service as his personal ATM and repeatedly took payments that raise the specter of pay-to-play corruption from individuals who sought and, in many cases obtained, favors from the commander-in-chief."
"From the time he became a candidate and launched his campaign as ' the greatest infomercial in political history,' Donald Trump has used the presidency—and his yearslong pursuit of it—as the world's greatest get-rich-quick scheme," the report states.
"Earlier this year, the Democratic staff of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability released a staff report documenting the nearly $8 million former President Trump received through just four of his businesses and over just parts of a two-year period from at least 20 foreign governments that sought—and in many cases received—favors from the Trump administration," the report notes.
"This figure is clearly just a fraction of the total amount of unconstitutional foreign emoluments President Trump collected while in office—a total that still needs to be fully accounted for," the paper contends.
As Common Dreamsreported in January, documents from Trump's former accounting firm reviewed by the committee revealed that businesses owned by the former president received payments from at least 20 foreign governments during his White House term, including over $5.5 million from China, $615,422 from Saudi Arabia, $465,744 from Qatar, and $303,372 from Kuwait.
The new report continues:
This follow-up report is based on a single set of records: guest logs for a single Trump property, Donald Trump's Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., covering just an 11-month period between September 2017 and August 2018 (excluding July 2018). Thus, the results would presumably represent less than one-quarter of Trump's ill-gotten gains from a single hotel over the course of his four-year term. While this is an exceedingly small window into the opaque web of more than 500 corporations, limited liability companies, and trusts that Donald Trump carried with him into the presidency, it is enough to reveal hundreds of unconstitutional and ethically suspect payments he accepted while in office from domestic sources—including a federal agency, numerous federal and state officials, and individuals who sought, and frequently obtained, federal offices as well as presidential pardons from him.
"The Constitution makes clear: Beyond a salary, the president may not receive any additional payments from federal or state governments," Raskin said in a statement. "This is a non-waivable prohibition against exploiting the office to convert and pocket public funds."
"While we still do not know the full extent of the unconstitutional payments Trump pocketed while fleecing American taxpayers, one thing is certain: We must put legal barriers in place now to prevent the kind of ripoff corruption our Founding Fathers so strongly opposed," Raskin added. "Given the need to enforce the U.S. Constitution against both foreign and domestic emoluments corruption, in the coming days, I will work with my Democratic colleagues on a legislative fix and hope that my Republican colleagues will join us in this effort."
The report notes that "Trump was very clear that he did not believe that the Constitution's prohibitions on either foreign or domestic emoluments applied to him. For example, in 2019, when public outrage forced him to reverse his plan to hold the following year's G7 summit at his 'foundering Doral resort,' he publicly denigrated what he called the 'phony Emoluments Clause.'"
"And far from expressing contrition for cashing in on the presidency, Donald Trump has made explicit his intent to expand his commodification of federal office if re-elected—including by gutting the federal civil service and replacing professional, expert, nonpolitical federal employees with a cadre of yes-men, sycophants, and loyalists," the paper adds.
Raskin said that "Trump
has made clear that he will not only refuse to divest from his businesses in a possible future presidency, but he will seek to multiply opportunities to commodify the Oval Office for his personal enrichment by turning thousands of civil service jobs into patronage positions—all with the attendant payoff possibilities from supplicant job-seekers and the prospective blessing of his hand-picked Supreme Court justices."
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Dems Say Big Oil Execs Failing to Come Clean on Trump's $1 Billion Quid Pro Quo Offer
"The behavior of Donald Trump and the oil and gas industry has added to evidence of possible misconduct," said three U.S. lawmakers.
Sep 10, 2024
A trio of senior congressional Democrats on Tuesday admonished fossil fuel executives to comply with a request for "information regarding quid pro quo solicitations" from former U.S. President Donald Trump, who earlier this year promised to gut climate regulations if they donated $1 billion to his Republican presidential campaign.
In May, Trump reportedly told Big Oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida that he would sign executive orders and take other action to boost the fossil fuel industry if they raised nine figures for his campaign. Executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, and other corporations reportedly attended the dinner.
A May analysis by the green group Friends of the Earth Action found that the fossil fuel industry would reap an estimated $110 billion windfall from tax breaks alone under Trump's proposed policies—an 11,000% return on Big Oil's billion-dollar investment.
Following the revelation of Trump's quid pro quo offer, House Oversight and Accountability Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Senate Budget Committee Chair Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote to the head of the American Petroleum Institute—the leading Big Oil lobby—and the CEOs of eight companies seeking answers about whether they accepted what Raskin called "Trump's explicit corrupt bargain."
Nearly four months later, the lawmakers are still awaiting satisfactory answers.
"Not only was your response to our inquiries insufficient; tellingly, none of the responses we have received to date refute the accuracy of the reporting, renewing our concern that Donald Trump is actively seeking to sell out American energy policy to the highest bidder," the trio wrote on Tuesday.
"In the weeks since our initial letters, the behavior of Donald Trump and the oil and gas industry has added to evidence of possible misconduct," the lawmakers continued. "Campaign finance records show that following Trump's quid pro quo solicitation at least one company made a significant contribution in support of Trump's presidential run."
"Specifically, on April 29, 2024, Continental Resources Inc. contributed $1 million to Make America Great Again, Inc.—a super PAC dedicated to Trump's reelection," they added. "Continental's CEO, Harold Hamm, who is also an informal adviser to Trump, has reportedly given $1.6 million to aid Trump's reelection so far this year, and he has raised millions more from independent oil producers operating in Texas and Alaska."
According to a Washington Postarticle published last month, Hamm's top priorities are "opening up more federal lands to drilling, easing the Endangered Species Act, and curbing numerous regulations at the Environmental Protection Agency."
During his first White House term, Trump rolled back regulations protecting the climate, environment, and biodiversity, resulting in increased pollution and premature deaths and fueling catastrophic planetary heating.
In addition to sounding the alarm over Trump's climate-wrecking policies, campaigners have expressed concerns about the GOP nominee's selection of Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate. Like Trump, Vance is a climate denier. He also has strong ties to the fossil fuel industry, his top donor.
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Dems Want to Know If Trump DOJ Covered Up Alleged $10 Million Egyptian Bribe
"Surely you would agree that the American people deserve to know whether a former president—and a current candidate for president—took an illegal campaign contribution from a brutal foreign dictator."
Sep 03, 2024
Congressional Democrats on Tuesday launched an investigation in response to recent Washington Postreporting on a closed federal probe into whether Egyptian President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi gave former U.S. President Donald Trump $10 million to illegally help his 2016 campaign.
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Congressman Robert Garcia (Calif.), a leader on the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, revealed their investigation in a letter to Trump, the Republican nominee for the November presidential election.
In addition to generating suspicion about a cash bribe from el-Sisi, Raskin and Garcia wrote to Trump, "this detailed news report has also triggered serious speculation that your handpicked political appointees at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), including Attorney General William Barr, subsequently blocked efforts by career prosecutors and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate the political and financial corruption that has been described."
"Surely you would agree that the American people deserve to know whether a former president—and a current candidate for president—took an illegal campaign contribution from a brutal foreign dictator," the pair continued, requesting that Trump turn over information necessary to assure the panel and the public that he never took money from the Egyptian leader or government.
"We are certain you can see how significant troubling questions still haunt our country about the origins of your $10 million campaign contribution."
The letter summarizes the Post's early August reporting, which was based on thousands of pages of government records and interviews with over two dozen people who spoke on the condition of anonymity and shared emails, texts, and other documents.
As the newspaper detailed: "Investigators identified a cash withdrawal in Cairo of $9,998,000—nearly identical to the amount described in the intelligence, as well as to the amount Trump had given his campaign weeks earlier. A key theory investigators pursued, based on intelligence and on international money transfers, was that Trump was willing to provide the fundsto his campaign in October 2016 because he expected to be repaid by Sisi, according to people familiar with the probe."
Michael Sherwin, the then-acting U.S. attorney who closed the case, told the Post that he stands by the decision. The Egyptian government, Trump campaign, Central Intelligence Agency, DOJ, FBI, U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C., and key individuals including Barr declined to answer the newspaper's questions, though some sent statements.
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung called the story "textbook Fake News," while Ayman Walash of Egypt's Foreign Press Center stressed that the DOJ probe ended without charges and said that "it is inappropriate to comment or refer to rulings issued by the judiciary system or procedures and reports taken by Justice Departments" in other nations.
Both the Post and the congressmen highlighted Trump's remarks and policies regarding Egypt and its leader, who seized power in 2013. Noting the Republican's meeting with el-Sisi shortly before the 2016 U.S. election, Raskin and Garcia wrote:
While others at the time "emphasized the importance of respect for rule of law and human rights to Egypt's future progress," you called President el-Sisi a "fantastic guy" and praised his tactics for taking "control" of Egypt. As president, you continued to praise President el-Sisi and drastically shifted U.S. policy in ways to benefit the reviled Egyptian leader. While calling President el-Sisi your "favorite dictator," you released $195 million in military aid in 2018 that the United States had previously withheld because of human rights abuses committed by the Egyptian government, and later released an additional $1.2 billion in military assistance.
"We are certain you can see how significant troubling questions still haunt our country about the origins of your $10 million campaign contribution, the source of any repayment, and the credible allegations that it was all funded with cash provided by President el-Sisi through his grim intelligence services," they added. "These questions are especially alarming given that the allegations appearing in The Washington Post are silhouetted against several proven patterns of corrupt practices exhibited by both the Egyptian government and by you, of course, as a convicted felon, fraudster, and corrupt politician."
As an example, the congressmen cited the corruption case of U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). The Post reporting was published just weeks after a federal jury found the senator guilty of accepting bribes from three businessmen and acting as a foreign agent for the Egyptian government. He finally resigned in mid-August.
Trump, in May, was convicted of 34 felony charges in New York over the falsification of business records related to hush money payments to cover up sex scandals during the 2016 election. He also faces cases at the federal level and in Georgia for his efforts to overturn his 2020 loss. Although a Trump-appointed judge recently dismissed another federal case related to his handling of classified materials, it could soon be revived by an appellate court.
Raskin is a longtime critic of Trump. He led the historic second impeachment of the ex-president and earlier this year launched a probe into the Republican's quid pro quo offer to Big Oil executives: $1 billion in campaign cash for killing climate policies. Some have even floated Raskin for U.S. attorney general if Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris beats Trump in November.
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