White House for Sale: ... [For] Donald Trump
Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2024 11:06 pm
-- White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump: Staff Report by Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Democratic Staff, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member, U.S. House of Representatives
White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump
Staff Report
Committee on Oversight and Accountability
Democratic Staff
Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member
U.S. House of Representatives
January 4, 2024
https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/
FOREWORD
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Ranking Member
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability
Many reports get published in Congress every year and sink into oblivion, but this one is unlikely to disappear. The findings and conclusions presented by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s Democratic staff are astounding—and they demand urgent action by the Congress and by the American people.
Drawing from actual receipts and records and using the most conservative possible accounting methodologies, White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump documents how, as President, Donald Trump accepted more than $7.8 million in payments from foreign states and their leaders, including some of the world’s most unsavory regimes. By elevating his personal financial interests and the policy priorities of corrupt foreign powers over the American public interest, former President Trump violated both the clear commands of the Constitution and the careful precedent set and observed by every previous Commander-in-Chief.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution forbids the President to accept money payments or gifts “of any kind whatever” from foreign governments and monarchs unless he obtains “the Consent of the Congress” to do so. Yet Donald Trump, while holding the office of president, used his business entities to pocket millions of dollars from foreign states and royalty and never once went to Congress to seek its consent. This report sets forth the records showing foreign government money—and all the spoils from royals we can find—pouring into hotels and buildings that the President continued to own during his presidency, all in direct violation of the Constitutional prohibition.
To be sure, we know about only some of the payments that passed into former President Trump’s hands during just two years of his presidency from just 20 of the more than 190 nations in the world through just four of his more than 500 businesses. Despite the Constitution’s requirement that a president disclose foreign emoluments and seek Congress’s consent to keep them, it took Oversight Committee Democrats years of aggressive litigation against the former President to obtain the subset of documents from Mazars, Donald Trump’s accounting firm, that form the factual basis of this report. And then, in January 2023, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer made the abrupt and outrageous decision to release Mazars from having to continue complying with the Committee’s subpoena and court-supervised settlement agreement. Despite Chairman Comer’s decision to bury further evidence, however, even this small slice of a picture of unknown proportions allows America to glimpse the rampant illegality and corruption of the Trump presidency. It is true that $7.8 million is almost certainly only a fraction of Trump’s harvest of unlawful foreign state money, but this figure in itself is a scandal and a decisive spur to action.
The report’s detailed findings make clear that we don’t have the laws in place to deal with a president who is willing to brazenly convert the presidency into a business for self-enrichment and wealth maximization with the collusive participation of foreign states. No other president had ever come close before to trying a rip-off like this simply based on vacuuming up foreign government money, which was the cardinal presidential offense and betrayal in the eyes of the Founders—an offense and betrayal made all the more striking here by the offender’s repeated laughable proclamations of “America First!”
This report forces us to confront fundamental questions that the Founders faced in designing American institutions: What kind of government will we have? Will it be devoted to the common good of all the people and will it actually put the interests of the people first? Or will it just be a structured opportunity for private gain and self-enrichment for schemers who excel at self-promotion and sneer at the rule of law? In answering these questions, we have one decisive advantage over the Founders: we have the Founders’ own handiwork in the Constitution which gives us precisely the principles we need to fortify democratic self-government and reject the practice of political leaders selling America out to foreign powers.
In the face of these stunning findings and conclusions, Oversight Committee Democrats are prepared to act in defense of the Constitution. We will develop a package of proposed legislative reforms to ensure that all occupants of the Oval Office abide by the Constitution’s unequivocal language commanding loyalty to the interests of the American people—not the interests of homicidal Saudi monarchs, totalitarian Chinese bureaucratic state capitalists, or other foreign actors looking to obtain policy favors and indulgences by paying off a president or his wholly owned businesses.
Supporting and defending our Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, is our sworn commitment in Congress. But the defense of democracy is the work of a nation, and we hope that all the American people will participate in it.
_________________________
Jamie Raskin
Ranking Member
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword .................................................................................................................................... 3
Executive Summary .................................................................................................................... 6
Background: The Foreign Emoluments Clause, Trump’s Businesses and Foreign Conflicts, and the Committee’s Investigation ............................................................................................ 17
Report Methodology and Document Limitations ...................................................................... 39
People’s Republic of China ....................................................................................................... 45
Saudi Arabia .............................................................................................................................. 67
Qatar ......................................................................................................................................... 83
United Arab Emirates ................................................................................................................ 93
Kuwait .................................................................................................................................... 101
India ........................................................................................................................................ 104
Philippines ............................................................................................................................... 113
Malaysia ................................................................................................................................. 117
Turkey .................................................................................................................................... 124
Democratic Republic of the Congo ......................................................................................... 132
Albania ................................................................................................................................... 140
Kosovo ................................................................................................................................... 144
Additional Emolument Spending ............................................................................................ 148
Additional Countries with Accounts at Trump-Owned Businesses ........................................ 155
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 156
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Constitution of the United States, Art. I, § 9, cl. 8
This report sets forth the results of a multi-year investigation into former President Donald Trump’s receipt of payments from foreign governments and foreign state-owned or state-controlled entities while in office. This systematic collection of foreign money was in direct violation of the explicit prohibition against such emoluments in the U.S. Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause. The Committee’s investigation began under the leadership of then-Ranking Member Elijah E. Cummings in 2016, the year when President-elect Trump was poised to bring with him into the office of President of the United States a sprawling and debt-laden corporate empire of more than 500 businesses operating in at least 25 different countries, and yet refused to divest himself of these corporate assets and properties. Instead, he declared himself still open for business to all comers, including princes, prime ministers, premiers, and foreign governments, who became his active, albeit constitutionally forbidden, financial patrons.1
In layman’s terms, an emolument is broadly defined as an “advantage, profit, or gain received as a result of one’s employment or one’s holding of office,” financial or otherwise, received either directly or indirectly.2 Shrouded in complexity and secrecy, President Trump’s global corporate empire proved to be a magnet for emoluments from foreign governments and government-sponsored sources across the globe. His businesses encompassed luxury hotels all over the world, high-end mixed-use buildings like Trump Tower in New York City, and destination golf resorts. When he arrived in the White House, then-President Trump was determined not only to keep this well-branded global corporate empire going but also to seize a new and unprecedented opportunity to make it ever more lucrative for himself and his family. It would soon become clear that he viewed the presidency as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for self-enrichment and profit maximization, courtesy of some of the most corrupt governments in the world. The presidency became the fulfillment of a get-rich-quick campaign he reportedly described as “the greatest infomercial in political history.”3
Immediately after the 2016 election, ethics experts from across the political spectrum read the writing on the wall and urged the new President-elect to fully divest himself of his business interests and place all their proceeds in a truly independent blind trust. These bipartisan ethics experts warned that if he did not divest, the President would remain the ultimate financial beneficiary of payments made to his businesses by foreign powers seeking favorable treatment from the government of the United States—exactly the predicament feared by the Framers of the Constitution and explicitly forbidden by the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.4
Throwing caution to the wind and the Constitution to the curb, former President Trump bluntly and cavalierly rejected all such bipartisan advice. He instead chose to place the “day-to-day” management of his businesses in the hands of his two adult sons while retaining personal ownership and control of all his businesses, as well as the ability to draw funds from them without any outside disclosure.5 He also refused to divest from his business entities, including those benefiting significantly from business with foreign governments. Instead, former President Trump merely pledged that The Trump Organization would enter into no new foreign deals.6
This transparently improper arrangement reinforced (rather than severed) his ties to his businesses and enabled him to prioritize his personal interests over those of the nation, as foreign governments and those acting on their behalf quickly began spending money at Trump properties in hopes of gaining the new President’s favor. Thus, the central constitutional ban on presidential acceptance of payments “of any kind whatever” from foreign governments was put in danger immediately.
By ignoring this fundamental constitutional command, former President Trump also threatened to obliterate a critical and defining principle of American democracy—namely, the strict separation of a president’s personal financial interests from those of the nation. In establishing the presidency, the Framers emphasized that the President was not a term-limited king but a public servant whose duty was to serve the common good rather than personal financial interests. The U.S. Constitution emphatically and unambiguously rejected the monarchical system, requiring our elected chief executive to use the office solely to advance the interests of the American people, rather than their own personal financial and business interests.
Given President Trump’s dramatic departures from the Constitution, the rule of law, and the prior unbroken history of presidential refusals to take foreign state money, as well as the repeated opportunities his business entanglements with foreign states created to use his office to advance his business dealings, Democrats on the Committee on Oversight and Accountability began a nearly seven-year long investigation, initiated by the late Ranking Member Elijah E. Cummings, advanced by Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney, and now completed, based on available materials, by Ranking Member Jamie Raskin. As this report makes clear, it provides a significant glimpse into former President Trump’s foreign financial dealings—but far from a comprehensive account of his unprecedented efforts to use the presidency to enrich himself and his family in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.
After President Trump and the White House had refused multiple requests from the Committee to provide documents voluntarily, and after Mr. Trump’s longtime former attorney, Michael Cohen, testified before the Committee that Mr. Trump routinely prepared false financial statements, then-Chairman Cummings issued a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s accounting firm at the time, Mazars USA, LLP (Mazars). This subpoena, issued in April 2019, sought documents to help Congress fulfill its constitutional responsibility to determine whether President Trump had business interests that could impair his ability to make policy decisions in the national interest, whether he was complying with the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution, and whether he made accurate financial disclosures to the Office of Government Ethics as required by law. President Trump fought hard to keep relevant financial documents secret, spending years litigating in an unsuccessful effort to block the Committee’s subpoena. In July 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision in Trump v. Mazars, holding that President Trump was not above the law and had to comply with the Committee’s subpoena under a new four-part test.7 President Trump continued to fight the scope of the subpoena in lower courts until September 2022, when a federal district court approved a settlement between President Trump, Mazars, and the Committee, pursuant to which the court supervised the agreement.8
However, in January 2023, upon becoming the new Chairman of the re-named Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Representative James Comer apparently decided to allow attorneys for President Trump to speak on behalf of the Committee and, acting in that wholly improper capacity, to release Mazars from its legal obligation to produce relevant records to the Committee under the court-supervised settlement. According to an email from former President Trump’s attorneys to Mazars, Chairman Comer authorized Mr. Trump’s attorneys to inform Mazars that “the Committee has no interest in forcing Mazars to complete [its production of documents] and is willing to release it from further obligations under the settlement agreement.”9 In June 2023, Mr. Trump and the Committee—under Chairman Comer’s direction—filed a joint motion for dismissal and termination of the case. The District Court granted the motion on July 5, 2023, ending the litigation and the court’s supervision of the parties’ agreement.
Despite these obstacles, Committee Democrats succeeded in obtaining a subset of documents that shine a light on the finances of at least some of the former President’s businesses, despite being incomplete and lacking in significant respects because of the Chairman’s actions and significant gaps in the records possessed by Mazars. This report presents the analysis of these documents prepared by the Committee’s Democratic staff. Critically, even this subset of documents reveals a stunning web of millions of dollars in payments made by foreign governments and their agents directly to Trump-owned businesses while President Trump was in the White House. These payments were made while these governments were promoting specific foreign policy goals with the Trump Administration and even, at times, with President Trump himself, and as they were requesting specific actions from the United States to advance their own national policy objectives.
Based on the subset of documents the Committee received from Mazars, this report concludes:
• Through entities he owned and controlled, President Trump accepted, at a minimum, millions of dollars in foreign emoluments in violation of the United States Constitution. The documents obtained from former President Trump’s accounting firm and from a federal agency demonstrate that four Trump-owned properties together collected, at the least, millions of dollars in payments from foreign governments and officials that violated the Constitution’s prohibition on emoluments “of any kind whatever” from foreign governments. These payments clearly fell within the definitions of emoluments set forth in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution and applied by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the federal judiciary, which include payments that flow from transactional relationships with foreign governments or entities, including so-called “market” transactions.
• President Trump’s businesses received, at a minimum, $7.8 million in foreign payments from at least 20 countries during his presidency. These included payments from foreign governments and foreign government-owned or -controlled entities to properties owned by Donald Trump, including Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas; Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; and Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York.
• President Trump never sought or received Congress’s approval to keep these foreign payments, as the Constitution requires. Instead of disclosing to Congress the foreign payments his businesses received during his presidency and requesting its consent to retain them pursuant to the process compelled by Article I, § 9, cl. 8—as multiple presidents before him had done—former President Trump actively concealed these payments and tried to prevent Congress from obtaining information about them. As a result, President Trump obstructed Congress’s duty under the Constitution to consider whether to permit the President to retain any of the foreign emoluments his businesses received.
• The foreign nations making payments to President Trump spanned the globe and included several of the most corrupt and authoritarian governments on Earth. They ranged from the People’s Republic of China to Saudi Arabia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Malaysia to Albania to Kosovo. These countries spent—often lavishly—on apartments and hotel stays at Donald Trump’s properties—personally enriching President Trump while he made foreign policy decisions connected to their policy agendas with far-reaching ramifications for the United States.
• Information available to the Committee shows that among countries patronizing Trump properties, China made the largest total payment to President Trump’s private business interests. According to the subset of documents obtained from Mazars and an additional document from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), these payments collectively included millions of dollars from China’s Embassy in the United States; the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), a Chinese state-owned enterprise; and Hainan Airlines Holding Company, a subsidiary of Chinese company HNA Group, owned by the Hainan provincial government.
• By pocketing foreign states’ payments, President Trump repeatedly placed his personal financial interest and the interests of foreign wealth and power above the public interest, resulting in precisely the split loyalty between foreign power and the American people that the Framers sought to avoid by writing the Foreign Emoluments Clause into the Constitution. Examples include the following:
o In 2017, President Trump did not impose sanctions on ICBC—his well-paying tenant in Trump Tower in New York—even though the DOJ in 2016 filed a complaint alleging that the bank had been among Chinese financial institutions that had provided accounts to a company that had allegedly conspired with a North Korean bank to evade U.S. sanctions.
o He did not sanction ICBC even after former Republican Chairman Ed Royce of the House Foreign Affairs Committee called on President Trump to “apply maximum financial and diplomatic pressure” by “targeting more Chinese banks that do business with North Korea.”11 President Trump expressed his own personal sympathies and constitutional indifference on the matter in the 2016 campaign when he stated: “I love China! The biggest bank in the world is from China. You know where their United States headquarters is located? In this building, in Trump Tower.”12
o The documents provided to the Committee reveal that Saudi Arabia and its royal family spent at least $615,422 at Trump properties during the Trump Administration, and the total amount of the country’s expenditures is likely much higher than that. In May 2017, while Saudi Arabia was spending lavishly at properties he owned, President Trump signed an arms deal with the Saudi government worth more than $100 billion, despite reports that the country repeatedly used weapons to cause mass civilian casualties during its ongoing military intervention in Yemen.13 President Trump also cast doubt on U.S. intelligence assessments concluding that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post contributing journalist and Saudi regime critic Jamal Khashoggi.14 At a campaign rally in 2015, then-candidate Trump articulated what would matter most to him in any conflict between his personal financial incentives related to the Saudis and American values and policy goals: “Saudi Arabia, I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million.” He continued, “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much!”15
o Over a seven-month period in 2017 and 2018, while the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) lobbied Trump Administration officials to support a blockade of Qatar that Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. had imposed, the U.A.E. spent tens of thousands of dollars at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., through four different stays. For many years, President Trump had business interests in Dubai, and he maintained those interests while he was in office.16 In February 2017, just after Donald Trump took office, both Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump attended the opening of a new Trump-branded golf course in the U.A.E.17
Importantly, the foreign payments to President Trump identified in this report are likely only a small fraction of the total amount of such payments he received during his presidency. This report is not able to provide a more comprehensive account of all of the foreign emoluments former President Trump’s businesses received during the time period covered by the Committee’s subpoena as a result of Chairman Comer’s successful effort, in coordination with Trump’s attorneys, to block the production of the remaining documents in discovery as soon as he became Chairman in 2023, as well as the failure of President Trump to provide to Mazars—or Mazars’s failure to retain—many key documents. Although the Supreme Court ruled in the Committee’s favor—and despite the fact that a federal judge was monitoring Mazars’s ongoing compliance with the court-approved settlement—Chairman Comer deliberately scuttled this agreement.18
Astonishingly, soon after becoming Chairman, Representative Comer claimed: “I honestly didn’t even know who or what Mazars was.” For years, President Trump aggressively litigated the case to thwart Mazars’s compliance with the Committee, but Chairman Comer has blamed Democrats for “‘investigating’ Trump for six years.” Instead of honoring the court-approved settlement, Chairman Comer made clear what he planned to do: “I know exactly what I’m investigating: money the Bidens received from China.”19 As promised, Chairman Comer halted any further document productions relating to President Trump’s receipt of foreign payments—from China or any other country—and launched an investigation of President Joseph Biden’s son, which to date has produced no evidence of any constitutional or criminal wrongdoing by President Biden.
In addition to placing his personal loyalty to Donald Trump above the institutional interests of Congress and the integrity of the Constitution, Chairman Comer worked with Donald Trump’s attorneys to bury further evidence of former President Trump’s misconduct by depriving the Committee’s Democratic staff of the ability to work with Mazars to conduct further searches for responsive records, including for any documents regarding payments potentially from Russia, South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil.
Notably, the set of documents Mazars did produce—before Chairman Comer’s shocking decision to release the company from its obligations—contained some staggering omissions. Under the terms of the September 2022 settlement agreement, Mazars was required to produce:
1. All documents from 2014 through 2018 related to any false or inaccurate information on President Trump’s public financial disclosures;
2. All documents from November 2016 through 2018 regarding the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; and
3. All documents from 2017 through 2018 regarding any financial transactions between President Trump and any foreign or domestic state agency or government official.20
For each of these categories, however, key documents were apparently never provided to or retained by Mazars.
For example, with regard to the first category, the Committee’s Democratic staff specifically requested information regarding a $20 million loan made by Daewoo, a South Korean commercial entity, that was not reported on President Trump’s 2015, 2016, or 2017 public financial disclosures.21 Mazars responded that it had no documents related to this loan. With regard to the second category, the Committee’s Democratic staff specifically requested hotel guest ledgers covering the 2017 presidential inauguration. Although Mazars provided hotel guest ledgers for various other time periods, it responded that it did not have ledgers covering the 2017 inauguration. And with regard to the third category, the Committee’s Democratic staff specifically requested information regarding ICBC’s nearly two-million dollar a year lease in Trump Tower. Once again, Mazars represented that it had no responsive documents.
The myriad payments by foreign governments, royalty, state-owned companies, and foreign agents revealed in the documents that Mazars did produce, as well as in public records, raise two distinct yet intertwined constitutional concerns. First, President Trump’s unprecedented acceptance of these hidden foreign payments clearly violated the Constitution’s prohibition against a president’s acceptance of foreign state emoluments without Congress’s consent. Second, President Trump’s failure to comply with the Foreign Emoluments Clause and to uphold his oath of office produced the exact kinds of presidential corruption and conflicts between the President’s personal financial interests and the public interest that this constitutional provision was designed to prevent. As James Madison wrote, the Foreign Emoluments Clause was adopted due to “the necessity of preserving foreign ministers and other officers of the U.S. independent of external influence.”22 As demonstrated throughout this report, Donald Trump’s business interests provided an irresistible entry point for external influence in American foreign policy and a continuing source of corruption in Trump’s conduct of U.S. foreign policy. It is these two linked concerns that this report seeks to bring to light and begin to remedy.
The Framers assumed that future presidents would comply with the Constitution’s specific requirement to seek Congress’s consent in order to retain any and all foreign emoluments being dangled before them. Before the Trump Administration, every president had done just that. The Framers clearly never envisioned a president who would simply disregard the constitutional wall of separation between the president’s personal finances and foreign government money inducements.
The unprecedented scope and scale of Mr. Trump’s receipt of unconstitutional foreign funds—and the failure of the current statutory regime to ensure an effective and timely response to his violations of the Constitution—demonstrate the pressing need to overhaul ethics and disclosure laws to protect essential anti-corruption principles in our law and Constitution from such flagrant Executive Branch abuse.
Congress now must decide how to respond. This report urges Congress to consider adopting a new legislative disclosure regime to help Congress obtain the information it needs to perform its assigned constitutional function of evaluating—and either approving or rejecting—the acceptance of foreign government emoluments by the president and other federal officials. This report also recommends that Congress consider instituting a more formal procedure for presidents and other officials to seek Congress’s permission when they receive and want to retain such emoluments. In the meantime, this investigation will continue to inform Congress and the American people about how to prevent senior public officials from taking advantage of their positions to reap private financial windfalls from foreign states—not only during but immediately before and after taking public office. Further, while this report focuses on former President Trump’s violations of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, the Mazars documents also reveal a pattern of payments from domestic individuals, entities, and government agencies that raise significant potential conflicts of interest and potential violations of the Constitution’s Domestic Emoluments Clause through expenditures at Trump-owned businesses. These will be the focus of a subsequent report.
The chart below identifies spending by foreign governments and entities at Trump-owned properties, all in violation of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, as reflected in the limited records produced to the Committee by Mazars and identified in publicly available information:
In addition, records provided to the Committee by Mazars indicate that Azerbaijan, Georgia, Namibia, Romania, and Costa Rica had accounts at a Trump-owned property after Donald Trump was elected President, but Mazars did not provide any documents detailing the purposes or amounts of these countries’ expenditures.
_______________
Notes:
1 Letter From Ranking Member Elijah E. Cummings, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to Chairman Jason Chaffetz, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (Nov. 14, 2016) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/si ... 003%29.pdf).
2 See Congressional Research Service, The Emoluments Clauses of the U.S. Constitution (Jan. 27, 2021) (online at https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11086) (quoting Black’s Law Dictionary).
3 Committee on Oversight and Reform, Hearing with Michael Cohen, Former Attorney to President Donald Trump, 116th Cong, Transcript at 14, 21–22 (Feb. 27, 2019) (online at http://www.congress.gov/116/chrg/CHRG-1 ... g35230.pdf); Cohen: Trump Described His Campaign As “The Greatest Infomercial in Political History,” The Hill (Feb. 27, 2019) (online at https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4318 ... political/).
4 Bipartisan Group Urges Trump, Family to Divest from Private Business, Washington Post (Dec. 9, 2016) (online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post ... -business/).
5 Trump Can Quietly Draw Money from Trust Whenever He Wants, New Documents Show, Washington Post (Apr. 3, 2017) (online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... story.html); Letter from Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney, Committee on Oversight and Reform, to Administrator Robin Carnahan, General Services Administration (Oct. 8, 2021) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/si ... 0Lease.pdf).
6 Donald Trump’s New York Times Interview: Full Transcript, New York Times (Nov. 23, 2016) (online at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/us/po ... cript.html); Trump Drops “No New Deals” Pledge, Politico (Jan. 11, 2017) (online at http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/t ... cts-233468).
7 Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP, 140 S. Ct. 2019 (2020).
8 Committee on Oversight and Reform, Press Release: Chairwoman Maloney’s Statement on Oversight Committee Securing Agreement to Obtain Former President Trump’s Financial Records (Sept. 1, 2022) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/ne ... reement-to).
9 Email from Patrick Strawbridge, Consovoy McCarthy PLLC, on behalf of Donald Trump, to Counsel for Mazars USA, LLP (Jan. 19, 2023) (on file with Committee).
10 See Order, Trump v. Committee on Oversight and Accountability of the U.S. House of Representatives, et al., Civil Action No. 1:19-cv-01136-APM (D.D.C. July 5, 2023).
11 House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Press Release: Chairman Royce Statement on North Korea (Sept. 3, 2017) (online at https://foreignaffairshouse.gov/press-r ... rth-korea/).
12 Trump’s Comments After Not Attacking Nike Raise Even More Questions, Washington Post (Sept. 5, 2018) (online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/poli ... questions/).
13 Trump Signs Kushner-Negotiated $100B Saudi Arms Deal, CNN (May 20, 2017) (online at http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/politics/ ... /indexhtml); What You Need to Know About the Crisis in Yemen, TIME (Nov. 3, 2016) (online at https://time.com/4552712/yemen-war-huma ... is-famine/).
14 Full Text: President Donald Trump’s Statement on Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi Killing, Politico (Nov. 20, 2018) (online at http://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/2 ... ng-1008219).
15 Trump Claims He Has “No Financial Interests in Saudi Arabia”—But He Makes Lots of Money from It, CNBC (Oct. 16, 2018) (online at http://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/trump-sa ... money.html).
16 Trump’s Business Ties in the Gulf Raise Questions About His Allegiances, New York Times (June 17, 2017) (online at http://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/17/world ... ances.html).
17 Trump Sons Open Dubai Golf Club as Namesake Now US President, Seattle Times (Feb. 18, 2017) (online at http://www.seattletimes.com/business/tr ... golf-club/).
18 Email from Patrick Strawbridge, Consovoy McCarthy PLLC, on behalf of Donald Trump, to Counsel for Mazars USA LLP (Jan. 19, 2023); Letter from Ranking Member Jamie Raskin to Chairman James Comer, Committee on Oversight and Accountability (Mar. 12, 2023) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/si ... bpoena.pdf); Comer Stymies Probe into Trump Tax Records, House Democrats Say, Washington Post (Mar. 13, 2023) (online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... stigation/); Order, Trump v. Committee on Oversight and Accountability of the U.S. House of Representatives, et al., Civil Action No. 1:19-cv-01136-APM (D.D.C. July 5, 2023).
19 House Republicans Quietly Halt Inquiry into Trump’s Finances, New York Times (Mar. 13, 2023) (online at http://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/us/po ... ation.html).
20 See Stipulated Agreement, attached as Exhibit A to Order, Donald J. Trump, et al. v. Committee on Oversight and Reform of the U.S. House of Representatives, et al., Civil Action No. 1:19-cv-01136-APM (D.D.C. Sept. 11, 2022).
21 Trump Owed Hidden Debt While in Office, Forbes (Dec. 4, 2022) (online at wwwforbes.com/sites/danalexander/2022/12/04/trump-owed-hidden-debt-while-in-office/).
22 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, at 389 (Max Farrand ed., 1911) (Madison’s notes) (online at https://constitution.congress.gov/brows ... F_00020473).
23 This chart reflects charges that the Mazars records and public records show were incurred by foreign nations at the Trump International Hotels in Washington, D.C., and in Las Vegas. For charges incurred by foreign nations at Trump World Tower or Trump Tower (both in New York), which all pertain to real estate owned or rented by foreign governments or entities, this report uses common charges or rent payments reflected in records produced by Mazars or in public information to estimate total payments during former President Trump’s presidency. For example, for units in Trump World Tower owned by foreign governments or entities, the Mazars records cover only charges paid in 2018. However, when public records show that the same foreign governments or entities owned these units throughout the Trump presidency, this report uses the common (base) charges paid in 2018 to estimate the total of such charges paid by the specified foreign nations during the entire Trump presidency. Similarly, a public record reflects that the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China leased property at Trump Tower, New York with an annual base rent of $1.9 million starting in 2008 and continuing at least through the expiration of the lease in October 2019. This report estimates the total rent payments from February 2017 through October 2019 based on that annual base rent.
White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump
Staff Report
Committee on Oversight and Accountability
Democratic Staff
Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member
U.S. House of Representatives
January 4, 2024
https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/
Dedicated to the late Congressman Elijah E. Cummings,
Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform
“The memory of the righteous is a blessing.”
FOREWORD
Congressman Jamie Raskin
Ranking Member
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability
Many reports get published in Congress every year and sink into oblivion, but this one is unlikely to disappear. The findings and conclusions presented by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s Democratic staff are astounding—and they demand urgent action by the Congress and by the American people.
Drawing from actual receipts and records and using the most conservative possible accounting methodologies, White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump documents how, as President, Donald Trump accepted more than $7.8 million in payments from foreign states and their leaders, including some of the world’s most unsavory regimes. By elevating his personal financial interests and the policy priorities of corrupt foreign powers over the American public interest, former President Trump violated both the clear commands of the Constitution and the careful precedent set and observed by every previous Commander-in-Chief.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution forbids the President to accept money payments or gifts “of any kind whatever” from foreign governments and monarchs unless he obtains “the Consent of the Congress” to do so. Yet Donald Trump, while holding the office of president, used his business entities to pocket millions of dollars from foreign states and royalty and never once went to Congress to seek its consent. This report sets forth the records showing foreign government money—and all the spoils from royals we can find—pouring into hotels and buildings that the President continued to own during his presidency, all in direct violation of the Constitutional prohibition.
To be sure, we know about only some of the payments that passed into former President Trump’s hands during just two years of his presidency from just 20 of the more than 190 nations in the world through just four of his more than 500 businesses. Despite the Constitution’s requirement that a president disclose foreign emoluments and seek Congress’s consent to keep them, it took Oversight Committee Democrats years of aggressive litigation against the former President to obtain the subset of documents from Mazars, Donald Trump’s accounting firm, that form the factual basis of this report. And then, in January 2023, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer made the abrupt and outrageous decision to release Mazars from having to continue complying with the Committee’s subpoena and court-supervised settlement agreement. Despite Chairman Comer’s decision to bury further evidence, however, even this small slice of a picture of unknown proportions allows America to glimpse the rampant illegality and corruption of the Trump presidency. It is true that $7.8 million is almost certainly only a fraction of Trump’s harvest of unlawful foreign state money, but this figure in itself is a scandal and a decisive spur to action.
The report’s detailed findings make clear that we don’t have the laws in place to deal with a president who is willing to brazenly convert the presidency into a business for self-enrichment and wealth maximization with the collusive participation of foreign states. No other president had ever come close before to trying a rip-off like this simply based on vacuuming up foreign government money, which was the cardinal presidential offense and betrayal in the eyes of the Founders—an offense and betrayal made all the more striking here by the offender’s repeated laughable proclamations of “America First!”
This report forces us to confront fundamental questions that the Founders faced in designing American institutions: What kind of government will we have? Will it be devoted to the common good of all the people and will it actually put the interests of the people first? Or will it just be a structured opportunity for private gain and self-enrichment for schemers who excel at self-promotion and sneer at the rule of law? In answering these questions, we have one decisive advantage over the Founders: we have the Founders’ own handiwork in the Constitution which gives us precisely the principles we need to fortify democratic self-government and reject the practice of political leaders selling America out to foreign powers.
In the face of these stunning findings and conclusions, Oversight Committee Democrats are prepared to act in defense of the Constitution. We will develop a package of proposed legislative reforms to ensure that all occupants of the Oval Office abide by the Constitution’s unequivocal language commanding loyalty to the interests of the American people—not the interests of homicidal Saudi monarchs, totalitarian Chinese bureaucratic state capitalists, or other foreign actors looking to obtain policy favors and indulgences by paying off a president or his wholly owned businesses.
Supporting and defending our Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, is our sworn commitment in Congress. But the defense of democracy is the work of a nation, and we hope that all the American people will participate in it.
_________________________
Jamie Raskin
Ranking Member
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword .................................................................................................................................... 3
Executive Summary .................................................................................................................... 6
Background: The Foreign Emoluments Clause, Trump’s Businesses and Foreign Conflicts, and the Committee’s Investigation ............................................................................................ 17
Report Methodology and Document Limitations ...................................................................... 39
People’s Republic of China ....................................................................................................... 45
Saudi Arabia .............................................................................................................................. 67
Qatar ......................................................................................................................................... 83
United Arab Emirates ................................................................................................................ 93
Kuwait .................................................................................................................................... 101
India ........................................................................................................................................ 104
Philippines ............................................................................................................................... 113
Malaysia ................................................................................................................................. 117
Turkey .................................................................................................................................... 124
Democratic Republic of the Congo ......................................................................................... 132
Albania ................................................................................................................................... 140
Kosovo ................................................................................................................................... 144
Additional Emolument Spending ............................................................................................ 148
Additional Countries with Accounts at Trump-Owned Businesses ........................................ 155
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 156
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Constitution of the United States, Art. I, § 9, cl. 8
This report sets forth the results of a multi-year investigation into former President Donald Trump’s receipt of payments from foreign governments and foreign state-owned or state-controlled entities while in office. This systematic collection of foreign money was in direct violation of the explicit prohibition against such emoluments in the U.S. Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause. The Committee’s investigation began under the leadership of then-Ranking Member Elijah E. Cummings in 2016, the year when President-elect Trump was poised to bring with him into the office of President of the United States a sprawling and debt-laden corporate empire of more than 500 businesses operating in at least 25 different countries, and yet refused to divest himself of these corporate assets and properties. Instead, he declared himself still open for business to all comers, including princes, prime ministers, premiers, and foreign governments, who became his active, albeit constitutionally forbidden, financial patrons.1
In layman’s terms, an emolument is broadly defined as an “advantage, profit, or gain received as a result of one’s employment or one’s holding of office,” financial or otherwise, received either directly or indirectly.2 Shrouded in complexity and secrecy, President Trump’s global corporate empire proved to be a magnet for emoluments from foreign governments and government-sponsored sources across the globe. His businesses encompassed luxury hotels all over the world, high-end mixed-use buildings like Trump Tower in New York City, and destination golf resorts. When he arrived in the White House, then-President Trump was determined not only to keep this well-branded global corporate empire going but also to seize a new and unprecedented opportunity to make it ever more lucrative for himself and his family. It would soon become clear that he viewed the presidency as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for self-enrichment and profit maximization, courtesy of some of the most corrupt governments in the world. The presidency became the fulfillment of a get-rich-quick campaign he reportedly described as “the greatest infomercial in political history.”3
Immediately after the 2016 election, ethics experts from across the political spectrum read the writing on the wall and urged the new President-elect to fully divest himself of his business interests and place all their proceeds in a truly independent blind trust. These bipartisan ethics experts warned that if he did not divest, the President would remain the ultimate financial beneficiary of payments made to his businesses by foreign powers seeking favorable treatment from the government of the United States—exactly the predicament feared by the Framers of the Constitution and explicitly forbidden by the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.4
Throwing caution to the wind and the Constitution to the curb, former President Trump bluntly and cavalierly rejected all such bipartisan advice. He instead chose to place the “day-to-day” management of his businesses in the hands of his two adult sons while retaining personal ownership and control of all his businesses, as well as the ability to draw funds from them without any outside disclosure.5 He also refused to divest from his business entities, including those benefiting significantly from business with foreign governments. Instead, former President Trump merely pledged that The Trump Organization would enter into no new foreign deals.6
This transparently improper arrangement reinforced (rather than severed) his ties to his businesses and enabled him to prioritize his personal interests over those of the nation, as foreign governments and those acting on their behalf quickly began spending money at Trump properties in hopes of gaining the new President’s favor. Thus, the central constitutional ban on presidential acceptance of payments “of any kind whatever” from foreign governments was put in danger immediately.
By ignoring this fundamental constitutional command, former President Trump also threatened to obliterate a critical and defining principle of American democracy—namely, the strict separation of a president’s personal financial interests from those of the nation. In establishing the presidency, the Framers emphasized that the President was not a term-limited king but a public servant whose duty was to serve the common good rather than personal financial interests. The U.S. Constitution emphatically and unambiguously rejected the monarchical system, requiring our elected chief executive to use the office solely to advance the interests of the American people, rather than their own personal financial and business interests.
Given President Trump’s dramatic departures from the Constitution, the rule of law, and the prior unbroken history of presidential refusals to take foreign state money, as well as the repeated opportunities his business entanglements with foreign states created to use his office to advance his business dealings, Democrats on the Committee on Oversight and Accountability began a nearly seven-year long investigation, initiated by the late Ranking Member Elijah E. Cummings, advanced by Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney, and now completed, based on available materials, by Ranking Member Jamie Raskin. As this report makes clear, it provides a significant glimpse into former President Trump’s foreign financial dealings—but far from a comprehensive account of his unprecedented efforts to use the presidency to enrich himself and his family in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.
After President Trump and the White House had refused multiple requests from the Committee to provide documents voluntarily, and after Mr. Trump’s longtime former attorney, Michael Cohen, testified before the Committee that Mr. Trump routinely prepared false financial statements, then-Chairman Cummings issued a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s accounting firm at the time, Mazars USA, LLP (Mazars). This subpoena, issued in April 2019, sought documents to help Congress fulfill its constitutional responsibility to determine whether President Trump had business interests that could impair his ability to make policy decisions in the national interest, whether he was complying with the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution, and whether he made accurate financial disclosures to the Office of Government Ethics as required by law. President Trump fought hard to keep relevant financial documents secret, spending years litigating in an unsuccessful effort to block the Committee’s subpoena. In July 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision in Trump v. Mazars, holding that President Trump was not above the law and had to comply with the Committee’s subpoena under a new four-part test.7 President Trump continued to fight the scope of the subpoena in lower courts until September 2022, when a federal district court approved a settlement between President Trump, Mazars, and the Committee, pursuant to which the court supervised the agreement.8
However, in January 2023, upon becoming the new Chairman of the re-named Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Representative James Comer apparently decided to allow attorneys for President Trump to speak on behalf of the Committee and, acting in that wholly improper capacity, to release Mazars from its legal obligation to produce relevant records to the Committee under the court-supervised settlement. According to an email from former President Trump’s attorneys to Mazars, Chairman Comer authorized Mr. Trump’s attorneys to inform Mazars that “the Committee has no interest in forcing Mazars to complete [its production of documents] and is willing to release it from further obligations under the settlement agreement.”9 In June 2023, Mr. Trump and the Committee—under Chairman Comer’s direction—filed a joint motion for dismissal and termination of the case. The District Court granted the motion on July 5, 2023, ending the litigation and the court’s supervision of the parties’ agreement.
Despite these obstacles, Committee Democrats succeeded in obtaining a subset of documents that shine a light on the finances of at least some of the former President’s businesses, despite being incomplete and lacking in significant respects because of the Chairman’s actions and significant gaps in the records possessed by Mazars. This report presents the analysis of these documents prepared by the Committee’s Democratic staff. Critically, even this subset of documents reveals a stunning web of millions of dollars in payments made by foreign governments and their agents directly to Trump-owned businesses while President Trump was in the White House. These payments were made while these governments were promoting specific foreign policy goals with the Trump Administration and even, at times, with President Trump himself, and as they were requesting specific actions from the United States to advance their own national policy objectives.
Based on the subset of documents the Committee received from Mazars, this report concludes:
• Through entities he owned and controlled, President Trump accepted, at a minimum, millions of dollars in foreign emoluments in violation of the United States Constitution. The documents obtained from former President Trump’s accounting firm and from a federal agency demonstrate that four Trump-owned properties together collected, at the least, millions of dollars in payments from foreign governments and officials that violated the Constitution’s prohibition on emoluments “of any kind whatever” from foreign governments. These payments clearly fell within the definitions of emoluments set forth in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution and applied by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the federal judiciary, which include payments that flow from transactional relationships with foreign governments or entities, including so-called “market” transactions.
• President Trump’s businesses received, at a minimum, $7.8 million in foreign payments from at least 20 countries during his presidency. These included payments from foreign governments and foreign government-owned or -controlled entities to properties owned by Donald Trump, including Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas; Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; and Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York.
• President Trump never sought or received Congress’s approval to keep these foreign payments, as the Constitution requires. Instead of disclosing to Congress the foreign payments his businesses received during his presidency and requesting its consent to retain them pursuant to the process compelled by Article I, § 9, cl. 8—as multiple presidents before him had done—former President Trump actively concealed these payments and tried to prevent Congress from obtaining information about them. As a result, President Trump obstructed Congress’s duty under the Constitution to consider whether to permit the President to retain any of the foreign emoluments his businesses received.
• The foreign nations making payments to President Trump spanned the globe and included several of the most corrupt and authoritarian governments on Earth. They ranged from the People’s Republic of China to Saudi Arabia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Malaysia to Albania to Kosovo. These countries spent—often lavishly—on apartments and hotel stays at Donald Trump’s properties—personally enriching President Trump while he made foreign policy decisions connected to their policy agendas with far-reaching ramifications for the United States.
• Information available to the Committee shows that among countries patronizing Trump properties, China made the largest total payment to President Trump’s private business interests. According to the subset of documents obtained from Mazars and an additional document from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), these payments collectively included millions of dollars from China’s Embassy in the United States; the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), a Chinese state-owned enterprise; and Hainan Airlines Holding Company, a subsidiary of Chinese company HNA Group, owned by the Hainan provincial government.
• By pocketing foreign states’ payments, President Trump repeatedly placed his personal financial interest and the interests of foreign wealth and power above the public interest, resulting in precisely the split loyalty between foreign power and the American people that the Framers sought to avoid by writing the Foreign Emoluments Clause into the Constitution. Examples include the following:
o In 2017, President Trump did not impose sanctions on ICBC—his well-paying tenant in Trump Tower in New York—even though the DOJ in 2016 filed a complaint alleging that the bank had been among Chinese financial institutions that had provided accounts to a company that had allegedly conspired with a North Korean bank to evade U.S. sanctions.
o He did not sanction ICBC even after former Republican Chairman Ed Royce of the House Foreign Affairs Committee called on President Trump to “apply maximum financial and diplomatic pressure” by “targeting more Chinese banks that do business with North Korea.”11 President Trump expressed his own personal sympathies and constitutional indifference on the matter in the 2016 campaign when he stated: “I love China! The biggest bank in the world is from China. You know where their United States headquarters is located? In this building, in Trump Tower.”12
o The documents provided to the Committee reveal that Saudi Arabia and its royal family spent at least $615,422 at Trump properties during the Trump Administration, and the total amount of the country’s expenditures is likely much higher than that. In May 2017, while Saudi Arabia was spending lavishly at properties he owned, President Trump signed an arms deal with the Saudi government worth more than $100 billion, despite reports that the country repeatedly used weapons to cause mass civilian casualties during its ongoing military intervention in Yemen.13 President Trump also cast doubt on U.S. intelligence assessments concluding that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post contributing journalist and Saudi regime critic Jamal Khashoggi.14 At a campaign rally in 2015, then-candidate Trump articulated what would matter most to him in any conflict between his personal financial incentives related to the Saudis and American values and policy goals: “Saudi Arabia, I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million.” He continued, “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much!”15
o Over a seven-month period in 2017 and 2018, while the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) lobbied Trump Administration officials to support a blockade of Qatar that Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. had imposed, the U.A.E. spent tens of thousands of dollars at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., through four different stays. For many years, President Trump had business interests in Dubai, and he maintained those interests while he was in office.16 In February 2017, just after Donald Trump took office, both Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump attended the opening of a new Trump-branded golf course in the U.A.E.17
Importantly, the foreign payments to President Trump identified in this report are likely only a small fraction of the total amount of such payments he received during his presidency. This report is not able to provide a more comprehensive account of all of the foreign emoluments former President Trump’s businesses received during the time period covered by the Committee’s subpoena as a result of Chairman Comer’s successful effort, in coordination with Trump’s attorneys, to block the production of the remaining documents in discovery as soon as he became Chairman in 2023, as well as the failure of President Trump to provide to Mazars—or Mazars’s failure to retain—many key documents. Although the Supreme Court ruled in the Committee’s favor—and despite the fact that a federal judge was monitoring Mazars’s ongoing compliance with the court-approved settlement—Chairman Comer deliberately scuttled this agreement.18
Astonishingly, soon after becoming Chairman, Representative Comer claimed: “I honestly didn’t even know who or what Mazars was.” For years, President Trump aggressively litigated the case to thwart Mazars’s compliance with the Committee, but Chairman Comer has blamed Democrats for “‘investigating’ Trump for six years.” Instead of honoring the court-approved settlement, Chairman Comer made clear what he planned to do: “I know exactly what I’m investigating: money the Bidens received from China.”19 As promised, Chairman Comer halted any further document productions relating to President Trump’s receipt of foreign payments—from China or any other country—and launched an investigation of President Joseph Biden’s son, which to date has produced no evidence of any constitutional or criminal wrongdoing by President Biden.
In addition to placing his personal loyalty to Donald Trump above the institutional interests of Congress and the integrity of the Constitution, Chairman Comer worked with Donald Trump’s attorneys to bury further evidence of former President Trump’s misconduct by depriving the Committee’s Democratic staff of the ability to work with Mazars to conduct further searches for responsive records, including for any documents regarding payments potentially from Russia, South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil.
Notably, the set of documents Mazars did produce—before Chairman Comer’s shocking decision to release the company from its obligations—contained some staggering omissions. Under the terms of the September 2022 settlement agreement, Mazars was required to produce:
1. All documents from 2014 through 2018 related to any false or inaccurate information on President Trump’s public financial disclosures;
2. All documents from November 2016 through 2018 regarding the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; and
3. All documents from 2017 through 2018 regarding any financial transactions between President Trump and any foreign or domestic state agency or government official.20
For each of these categories, however, key documents were apparently never provided to or retained by Mazars.
For example, with regard to the first category, the Committee’s Democratic staff specifically requested information regarding a $20 million loan made by Daewoo, a South Korean commercial entity, that was not reported on President Trump’s 2015, 2016, or 2017 public financial disclosures.21 Mazars responded that it had no documents related to this loan. With regard to the second category, the Committee’s Democratic staff specifically requested hotel guest ledgers covering the 2017 presidential inauguration. Although Mazars provided hotel guest ledgers for various other time periods, it responded that it did not have ledgers covering the 2017 inauguration. And with regard to the third category, the Committee’s Democratic staff specifically requested information regarding ICBC’s nearly two-million dollar a year lease in Trump Tower. Once again, Mazars represented that it had no responsive documents.
The myriad payments by foreign governments, royalty, state-owned companies, and foreign agents revealed in the documents that Mazars did produce, as well as in public records, raise two distinct yet intertwined constitutional concerns. First, President Trump’s unprecedented acceptance of these hidden foreign payments clearly violated the Constitution’s prohibition against a president’s acceptance of foreign state emoluments without Congress’s consent. Second, President Trump’s failure to comply with the Foreign Emoluments Clause and to uphold his oath of office produced the exact kinds of presidential corruption and conflicts between the President’s personal financial interests and the public interest that this constitutional provision was designed to prevent. As James Madison wrote, the Foreign Emoluments Clause was adopted due to “the necessity of preserving foreign ministers and other officers of the U.S. independent of external influence.”22 As demonstrated throughout this report, Donald Trump’s business interests provided an irresistible entry point for external influence in American foreign policy and a continuing source of corruption in Trump’s conduct of U.S. foreign policy. It is these two linked concerns that this report seeks to bring to light and begin to remedy.
The Framers assumed that future presidents would comply with the Constitution’s specific requirement to seek Congress’s consent in order to retain any and all foreign emoluments being dangled before them. Before the Trump Administration, every president had done just that. The Framers clearly never envisioned a president who would simply disregard the constitutional wall of separation between the president’s personal finances and foreign government money inducements.
The unprecedented scope and scale of Mr. Trump’s receipt of unconstitutional foreign funds—and the failure of the current statutory regime to ensure an effective and timely response to his violations of the Constitution—demonstrate the pressing need to overhaul ethics and disclosure laws to protect essential anti-corruption principles in our law and Constitution from such flagrant Executive Branch abuse.
Congress now must decide how to respond. This report urges Congress to consider adopting a new legislative disclosure regime to help Congress obtain the information it needs to perform its assigned constitutional function of evaluating—and either approving or rejecting—the acceptance of foreign government emoluments by the president and other federal officials. This report also recommends that Congress consider instituting a more formal procedure for presidents and other officials to seek Congress’s permission when they receive and want to retain such emoluments. In the meantime, this investigation will continue to inform Congress and the American people about how to prevent senior public officials from taking advantage of their positions to reap private financial windfalls from foreign states—not only during but immediately before and after taking public office. Further, while this report focuses on former President Trump’s violations of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, the Mazars documents also reveal a pattern of payments from domestic individuals, entities, and government agencies that raise significant potential conflicts of interest and potential violations of the Constitution’s Domestic Emoluments Clause through expenditures at Trump-owned businesses. These will be the focus of a subsequent report.
The chart below identifies spending by foreign governments and entities at Trump-owned properties, all in violation of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, as reflected in the limited records produced to the Committee by Mazars and identified in publicly available information:
Country / Total Spending Identified23 / Trump Businesses Patronized
China
$5,572,548
• Trump Tower
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
• Trump International Hotel (Las Vegas, NV)
Saudi Arabia
$615,422
• Trump World Tower
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Qatar
$465,744
• Trump World Tower
Kuwait
$303,372
• Trump World Tower
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
India
$282,764
• Trump World Tower
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Malaysia
$248,962
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Afghanistan
$154,750
• Trump World Tower
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Philippines
$74,810
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
United Arab Emirates
$65,225
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Democratic Republic of Congo
$25,171
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Kazakhstan
$23,772
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Thailand
$11,340
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Self-Declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
$8,800
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Mongolia
$8,486
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Lebanon
$7,720
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Albania
$6,002
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Kosovo
$4,950
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Latvia
$2,739
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Turkey
$1,894
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Hungary
$1,011
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
Cyprus
$590
• Trump International Hotel (Washington, D.C.)
In addition, records provided to the Committee by Mazars indicate that Azerbaijan, Georgia, Namibia, Romania, and Costa Rica had accounts at a Trump-owned property after Donald Trump was elected President, but Mazars did not provide any documents detailing the purposes or amounts of these countries’ expenditures.
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Notes:
1 Letter From Ranking Member Elijah E. Cummings, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to Chairman Jason Chaffetz, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (Nov. 14, 2016) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/si ... 003%29.pdf).
2 See Congressional Research Service, The Emoluments Clauses of the U.S. Constitution (Jan. 27, 2021) (online at https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11086) (quoting Black’s Law Dictionary).
3 Committee on Oversight and Reform, Hearing with Michael Cohen, Former Attorney to President Donald Trump, 116th Cong, Transcript at 14, 21–22 (Feb. 27, 2019) (online at http://www.congress.gov/116/chrg/CHRG-1 ... g35230.pdf); Cohen: Trump Described His Campaign As “The Greatest Infomercial in Political History,” The Hill (Feb. 27, 2019) (online at https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4318 ... political/).
4 Bipartisan Group Urges Trump, Family to Divest from Private Business, Washington Post (Dec. 9, 2016) (online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post ... -business/).
5 Trump Can Quietly Draw Money from Trust Whenever He Wants, New Documents Show, Washington Post (Apr. 3, 2017) (online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... story.html); Letter from Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney, Committee on Oversight and Reform, to Administrator Robin Carnahan, General Services Administration (Oct. 8, 2021) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/si ... 0Lease.pdf).
6 Donald Trump’s New York Times Interview: Full Transcript, New York Times (Nov. 23, 2016) (online at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/us/po ... cript.html); Trump Drops “No New Deals” Pledge, Politico (Jan. 11, 2017) (online at http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/t ... cts-233468).
7 Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP, 140 S. Ct. 2019 (2020).
8 Committee on Oversight and Reform, Press Release: Chairwoman Maloney’s Statement on Oversight Committee Securing Agreement to Obtain Former President Trump’s Financial Records (Sept. 1, 2022) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/ne ... reement-to).
9 Email from Patrick Strawbridge, Consovoy McCarthy PLLC, on behalf of Donald Trump, to Counsel for Mazars USA, LLP (Jan. 19, 2023) (on file with Committee).
10 See Order, Trump v. Committee on Oversight and Accountability of the U.S. House of Representatives, et al., Civil Action No. 1:19-cv-01136-APM (D.D.C. July 5, 2023).
11 House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Press Release: Chairman Royce Statement on North Korea (Sept. 3, 2017) (online at https://foreignaffairshouse.gov/press-r ... rth-korea/).
12 Trump’s Comments After Not Attacking Nike Raise Even More Questions, Washington Post (Sept. 5, 2018) (online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/poli ... questions/).
13 Trump Signs Kushner-Negotiated $100B Saudi Arms Deal, CNN (May 20, 2017) (online at http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/politics/ ... /indexhtml); What You Need to Know About the Crisis in Yemen, TIME (Nov. 3, 2016) (online at https://time.com/4552712/yemen-war-huma ... is-famine/).
14 Full Text: President Donald Trump’s Statement on Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi Killing, Politico (Nov. 20, 2018) (online at http://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/2 ... ng-1008219).
15 Trump Claims He Has “No Financial Interests in Saudi Arabia”—But He Makes Lots of Money from It, CNBC (Oct. 16, 2018) (online at http://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/trump-sa ... money.html).
16 Trump’s Business Ties in the Gulf Raise Questions About His Allegiances, New York Times (June 17, 2017) (online at http://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/17/world ... ances.html).
17 Trump Sons Open Dubai Golf Club as Namesake Now US President, Seattle Times (Feb. 18, 2017) (online at http://www.seattletimes.com/business/tr ... golf-club/).
18 Email from Patrick Strawbridge, Consovoy McCarthy PLLC, on behalf of Donald Trump, to Counsel for Mazars USA LLP (Jan. 19, 2023); Letter from Ranking Member Jamie Raskin to Chairman James Comer, Committee on Oversight and Accountability (Mar. 12, 2023) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/si ... bpoena.pdf); Comer Stymies Probe into Trump Tax Records, House Democrats Say, Washington Post (Mar. 13, 2023) (online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... stigation/); Order, Trump v. Committee on Oversight and Accountability of the U.S. House of Representatives, et al., Civil Action No. 1:19-cv-01136-APM (D.D.C. July 5, 2023).
19 House Republicans Quietly Halt Inquiry into Trump’s Finances, New York Times (Mar. 13, 2023) (online at http://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/us/po ... ation.html).
20 See Stipulated Agreement, attached as Exhibit A to Order, Donald J. Trump, et al. v. Committee on Oversight and Reform of the U.S. House of Representatives, et al., Civil Action No. 1:19-cv-01136-APM (D.D.C. Sept. 11, 2022).
21 Trump Owed Hidden Debt While in Office, Forbes (Dec. 4, 2022) (online at wwwforbes.com/sites/danalexander/2022/12/04/trump-owed-hidden-debt-while-in-office/).
22 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, at 389 (Max Farrand ed., 1911) (Madison’s notes) (online at https://constitution.congress.gov/brows ... F_00020473).
23 This chart reflects charges that the Mazars records and public records show were incurred by foreign nations at the Trump International Hotels in Washington, D.C., and in Las Vegas. For charges incurred by foreign nations at Trump World Tower or Trump Tower (both in New York), which all pertain to real estate owned or rented by foreign governments or entities, this report uses common charges or rent payments reflected in records produced by Mazars or in public information to estimate total payments during former President Trump’s presidency. For example, for units in Trump World Tower owned by foreign governments or entities, the Mazars records cover only charges paid in 2018. However, when public records show that the same foreign governments or entities owned these units throughout the Trump presidency, this report uses the common (base) charges paid in 2018 to estimate the total of such charges paid by the specified foreign nations during the entire Trump presidency. Similarly, a public record reflects that the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China leased property at Trump Tower, New York with an annual base rent of $1.9 million starting in 2008 and continuing at least through the expiration of the lease in October 2019. This report estimates the total rent payments from February 2017 through October 2019 based on that annual base rent.