Raskin demands Trump Org turn over records in probe of foreign payments

Source: The Hill | January 22, 2024 | 01/22/24

Raskin demands Trump Org turn over business records in probe of foreign payments

The top Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee is asking the Trump Organization to turn over the entirety of its business records, arguing it’s the only way the panel can understand the full extent to which former President Trump profited from foreign governments while in office.

The letter from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) follows a report from the committee concluding Trump earned nearly $8 million from foreign governments while in office.  

Trump failed to disclose those profits to Congress, something Raskin said violates the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which bars leaders from accepting anything of value from foreign governments without the blessing of lawmakers. 

Digging into a letter from the Trump Organization after it rebuffed his calls earlier this year to return the profits, Raskin said the written rejection from the Trump team is an “admission that, without congressional consent, he collected while in office at least $7.8 million from at least 20 foreign governments—with the People’s Republic of China and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia being his leading patrons.” 

Democrats acknowledged the limitations in their report when it was released earlier this month. They note gaps in the information they received relative to Trump’s business empire, as well as the fact that accounting firm Mazars stopped producing records won via court battle, citing a notification they got from Trump’s attorneys that referenced a conversation with the panel’s GOP leadership.   

However, the lion’s share of the documented foreign money — some $5.6 million — flowed from China, which, along with other countries, primarily patronized three properties: Trump hotels in Washington and Las Vegas and Trump Tower in New York. 

That includes $5.4 million spent over nearly three years by the Chinese state-affiliated Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), which had secured space at Trump Tower.

The Trump Organization wrote in a letter last week that many of the leases that contributed millions toward that figure were signed before Trump was elected and noted that he donated those profits as well as his presidential salary to the Treasury. 

To Raskin, that largely served as confirmation of the committee’s work.

“You conspicuously do not dispute the millions of dollars that foreign governments spent at Trump-owned properties, the identities of the corrupt and autocratic governments that spent those sums, or the myriad policy favors and changes that those governments were seeking to obtain from the Trump Administration—and, in numerous cases, did obtain—at the time they were filling Trump’s pockets,” Raskin wrote in the letter obtained by The Hill. 

“Nor do you dispute that the former President never came to Congress to disclose the foreign government payments he wanted to accept or to seek congressional consent to keep them—as the Foreign Emoluments Clause required him to do.” 

Trump’s team wrote that the “vast majority” of foreign government funding it took in while he was in office came from leases like those secured by ICBC and that it turned over 100 percent of the “estimated profits” from its hospitality properties. 

But Raskin said by relying on estimates of profits and only from Trump’s hotels and towers, they are excluding income that may have come in through some 500 different Trump-affiliated businesses.  

“[Trump] did the one thing the Constitution clearly prohibits: he accepted payments from foreign governments without congressional approval. In any case, you don’t quantify what ‘vast majority’ actually means. We’d like to do an independent audit to find out whether this statement is true,” Raskin wrote. 

Earlier work from the committee found Trump donated around $450,000 in profits from his businesses to the Treasury over his four years in office — a figure that represents a significant gap from the almost $8 million in profits found by Democrats as they reviewed a fraction of Trump business records.

……..

Tagged: , , , ,

Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic.