Trump’s Interests vs. America’s, Dubai Edition Part IIIThat Meeting in BrusselsOn the European leg of his first foreign trip, President Donald Trump elucidated the relationship between his business and his presidency, although in a way that only further complicates the already-difficult task of understanding how his financial interests might impact his decisions in office. According to the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, in a meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, Trump discussed his skepticism toward the European Union through the lens of his experiences as a real-estate mogul. Per a translation in The Guardian, an anonymous source told the paper, “Every time we talk about a country, [Trump] remembered the things he had done. Scotland? He said he opened a club. Ireland? He said it took him two and a half years to get a license and that did not give him a very good image of the European Union.”
The meeting isn’t the first time the president has discussed the Trump Organization—which he still owns, but no longer operates—with other world leaders: In a phone call with Turkish President Recep Erdogan, one of the first Trump made after his election, he relayed praise from a business partner on the company’s towers in Istanbul; on the line with Mauricio Macri, the president of Argentina, Trump mentioned a long-stalled project in Buenos Aires (which suspiciously began moving forward after the exchange).
His conversation with Michel, though, is different, for one key reason: Trump has no hotels in Belgium—and, unless his company is willing to violate a pledge meant to mitigate conflicts of interest, it won’t be pursuing deals there until Trump is out of office. That doesn’t definitively preclude the possibility that he meant to boost his businesses by venting to Michel, but it certainly reduces its likelihood.
What the conversation does do, though, is demonstrate how inextricable Trump’s businesses are from his behavior as president. It’s not just that Trump has ample knowledge of his holdings to act in his own financial interests and little reason to fear that a Republican-controlled Congress might try to stop him. It’s also that Trump seems to approach every issue with a mind toward how it’s impacted his company in the past—and how it will impact his company in the future. As the aforementioned anonymous source in Le Soir described it, “One feels that he wants a system where everything can be realized very quickly and without formality”—a broad pro-business stance that would just so happen to make it significantly easier for the Trump Organization to operate in Europe as well.
As long as the president retains ownership of his company, it’s possible to impute the Trump Organization’s footprint in a variety of the administration’s policy stances. For instance, the notion that Trump favors leaders of countries where he has property is arguably the least concerning explanation for his affinity for noted authoritarians like Erdogan and Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte. On economic issues as well, the president has supported numerous policies over the years that would mainly help wealthy businesspeople in general and the Trump Organization in particular; for example, he’s in favor of weakening the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which would make it significantly easier for his company to move forward on deals in countries like Azerbaijan where bribery of public officials is more common than it is in the U.S. These questions of where genuine policy positions end and self-interest begins will continue—unless, of course, Trump does what ethics experts have urged him to do and actually sells his business.
That Tower in TorontoPresident Donald Trump’s properties around the world bring with them business partners from around the world. Several of these ties have already come under scrutiny: A Trump-branded tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, put him in business with allegedly corrupt officials who are themselves connected with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, for example, while two properties in Indonesia link him to officials implicated in a bribery scandal and a racially-motivated attempt to oust a sitting governor.
Now, The Wall Street Journal has reported an additional source of a conflict of interest along these lines: Trump International Tower and Hotel in Toronto. According to the Journal, one of Trump’s partners in the project, Alexander Shnaider, received millions of dollars from the Russian bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB, shortly before investing in the project. Shnaider, who is Russian American and was the main developer on the Trump-branded property, sold his own company’s share in a Ukrainian steelmaker to VEB for $850 million in 2010. Shnaider’s lawyer said in April that $15 million from the sale went into the Toronto tower, although he walked back his statement the next day, writing that he is “not able to confirm that any funds” from the sale went into the project.
VEB is owned by the Russian government; according to its website, its mandate is “to enhance [the] competitiveness of the Russian economy, diversify it, and stimulate investment activity,” and the bank’s supervisory board is chaired by the country’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. At the time of the deal with Shnaider’s company, though, its chairman was the current Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, according to a Russian government official and multiple experts, would have had to sign off on such an exchange.
As with many of Trump’s business holdings, the property represents a conflict of interest because it brings him revenue that’s made possible by money from a bank owned and operated by a foreign government. Though Trump doesn’t own the tower—he merely licenses his name to Shnaider, who owns the building through his company Talon International Development Inc.—the Trump Organization nevertheless profits off of the building and, by extension, from VEB’s deal with Shnaider. This potentially gives the Russian government leverage that it could use should it want to influence Trump’s policies. That means that the Trump Organization’s continued involvement with the tower may represent a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which precludes elected officials from “accept[ing] of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
The Journal’s report highlights the inadequacy of the financial disclosures the president has so far offered. Last week, Trump insisted that his company does not have business ties to Russian “persons or entities.” As my colleague David Graham wrote, the letter from Trump’s lawyers that Trump proffered on the subject last week “doesn’t define several key terms,” leaving open the possibility that one of Trump’s projects benefited from Russian funding through a pass-through corporation or another intermediary. VEB’s role in the financing of the Trump-branded property in Toronto is a perfect example: Because money from VEB went toward enriching Trump (through Shnaider), one can reasonably argue that Trump didn’t do enough to eliminate the conflict of interest that the hotel creates for him in office.
That Caribbean VillaPresident Donald Trump has another property on the market: Le Château des Palmiers, his estate on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. The president’s company bought the 11-bedroom beachfront compound in 2013, and the Trump Organization has been using it as a rental property ever since. It’s listed at $6,000 per night on TripAdvisor; according to specialty sites such as Luxury Retreats, which lists the price as between $6,000 and $20,000, and Mansion Global, which places the upper limit at $28,000, the price increases substantially during the winter, when the Caribbean offers an escape from cold weather. According to the disclosure forms Trump submitted to the Federal Election Commission (which remain the only public documentation of his finances), he derived between $100,001 and $1 million from the property in the year leading up to May 2016.
The asking price for Le Château des Palmiers remains unknown. The Trump Organization is selling the property through the real-estate agency and auction house Sotheby’s; according to the listing for the complex, the price is available only upon request. However, there are some clues available. On his FEC disclosure forms, Trump lists the property as worth between $5 million and $25 million, which does correspond with the $19.7 million he paid for it four years ago. According to Mansion Global, 7th Heaven, a real-estate brokerage in St. Maarten, has identified the asking price as $28 million, although 7th Heaven’s current page for the property lists the price as “PoA,” or Price on Application.
Though Trump no longer runs the Trump Organization, he still owns the company and, by extension, the property, meaning that he will profit from its sale. That means that Le Château des Palmiers offers yet another avenue by which somebody could attempt to influence the president’s decisions by putting a large sum of money in his pocket. It would even be possible for somebody to make an offer well above the currently unknown asking price to curry favor with him (and, possibly, through the artful use of a shell company, hide their identity).
As NPR noted, the Trump Organization’s decision to sell Le Château des Palmiers is “the first known major divestiture of a Trump property since he became president.” As such, it demonstrates the insufficiency of the steps the president has taken to eliminate his conflicts of interest. Trump has put the leadership of his company in the hands of his adult sons and a longtime Trump Organization executive with relatively few—and, based on Donald Jr. and Eric’s frequent presence at administration events and Eric’s statement that he will share some business-related data with his father, relatively permeable—barriers blinding him from knowledge of his financial interests.
Had Trump taken the measures suggested repeatedly by ethics experts on both sides of the political aisle, he would by now have put his assets in what’s called a blind trust, which would entail turning over his empire to a third party with whom he will have no contact, who would sell off the properties and reinvest the resulting money in other assets without providing the president any information about the sales or the purchases. Instead, Trump has set up a system under which, even if he does proceed to sell off his business, one property at a time, he will simply create new conflicts of interest as he takes payments from those who are purchasing the Trump Organization’s real estate.
Those Condos for SalePresident Donald Trump’s finances are infamously opaque. Since he has not followed the long-standing presidential custom of releasing his tax returns to the public, the only publicly available records of where he derives his income are his two filings with the Federal Elections Commission. Even those are difficult to parse: Much of his business empire comprises limited-liability companies (or LLCs), which face very few disclosure requirements, and shell and pass-through corporations, which can obscure ownership and make money trails harder to follow.
Much the same can be said for whoever has been buying up Trump Organization condominiums. A lengthy investigation published in USA Today found that, “since launching his White House bid, Trump’s companies have sold at least 58 units nationwide”—out of a total of more than 400 currently on the market—”for about $90 million. Almost half of those sold to LLCs.” One of those LLCs, a financial firm created shortly before the Republican National Convention named Milan Investment Limited, spent $3.1 million to buy 11 condominiums in the building the president co-owns in Las Vegas.
Normally, such a story would then identify who is behind the purchase and whether they may have some ulterior motive in buying something from the president. In this case, though, repeated efforts by the USA Today to ascertain who exactly is behind Milan apparently came up empty. The company’s headquarters in a strip mall the outskirts of Las Vegas are registered to two individuals named Jun Xu and Qi Huang; however, the reporters were unable to reach Xu and Huang through either their listed addresses and phone numbers or through business associates. A third individual associated with Milan, Chen Huang, also apparently could not be reached for comment, nor did the Trump Organization respond to inquiries about the identities of the buyers. The newspaper’s attempts to find the buyers of other Trump Organization condos met with mixed results: Though reporters were able to track down the real people behind some of the purchases, including a couple who said they bought the property because they’re fans of Trump’s, others proved just as elusive as whoever is behind Milan.
As the USA Today notes, the story highlights one of the major problems underlying Trump’s decision to retain his businesses while in office. There is no law requiring a shell company like Milan to disclose the identities of its owner(s) or the source of its money while purchasing real estate. The Trump Organization still owns hundreds of condominiums, the sales of which will directly profit it and, by extension, the president; this offers plenty of chances for any individual or corporation to purchase a unit to attempt to curry favor with Trump without having to disclose their own identity to the public.
So far, the Republican-controlled Congress has shown little interest in investigating the constitutionality of Trump’s decision to hold onto his businesses. That means that the only real disincentive for those attempting to influence the president by patronizing his businesses is the bad publicity that might ensue. But Milan Investment Limited’s secretive investment in Trump’s properties shows how easy it would be for an individual or a corporation to stay anonymous and avoid that scrutiny.
Those Reelection-Campaign FundsFor President Donald Trump, it pays to be in constant campaign mode.
Metaphorically, at least, this isn’t unusual; the idea of the “permanent campaign,” a reference to how politicians consider their reelection chances from almost the moment they take office, has been around for decades. Such is the case for Trump, who filed a letter with the Federal Election Commission establishing his eligibility to run for a second term in 2020 just hours after taking the oath of office. Though the letter declares only that he can run, not necessarily that he will run, it gives broad coverage for the president to begin fundraising and holding campaign events, and to do so far earlier in his first term than have previous presidents.
Since doing so, Trump has held several events that, while officially presented as part of his “thank-you tour,” have seemed an awful lot like his campaign rallies. Meanwhile, between merchandise sales and an already-active fundraising effort, he has raised more than $7.1 million, and the Republican National Committee has raised an additional $23 million. That’s not necessarily noteworthy by itself; by this time, President Obama and the Democratic National Committee had raised $15 million. (Obama had not yet filed for eligibility in 2012 three months into his first term, although he had held events to promote his economic-stimulus package.) What does make Trump unusual is that he has already spent $6.3 million of his reelection campaign funds—and, according to reports he recently filed with the FEC, he is paying some of that money to his own personal businesses—for instance, renting space at his hotels or golfing on his courses—thereby literally profiting off of his permanent campaign.
This practice is nothing new for Trump. As early as 2000, he was speculating that he “could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it” by patronizing his own businesses and running the campaign out of one of his properties. During his 2016 bid, he did exactly that, establishing his political headquarters in Trump Tower (and quintupling the rent as soon as he became the Republican nominee and began drawing funds from the party rather than his personal war chest). Shortly before his victory, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s campaign had paid out the unprecedented sum of more than $14 million to his family and companies for such services as flights on his personal airplanes, rent at Trump Tower, and meals and hotel rooms at other Trump buildings.
Similarly, since taking office, Trump has profited off of the federal government’s newfound need to patronize his properties. Both the Secret Service and Department of Defense are renting out space in Trump Tower, for example, with the former believed to be paying at least $3 million per year to do so. This has led to rumblings that Trump may be violating the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which holds that the president “shall not receive ... any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them,” beyond his official salary.
The amount Trump’s reelection campaign has spent at his businesses is comparatively small: According to The Wall Street Journal, more than 6 percent of the $6.3 million it’s spent so far, or almost $500,000, went to Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and restaurants. But that’s a higher rate than when his campaign money was going to his own businesses for the 2016 campaign ($14 million out of a total of $322 million, or about 4.3 percent). At his current rate, if he spends a similar amount over the next election cycle—and given that he’s already started spending, he could easily far outdo himself—he would be directing nearly $20 million to his own businesses.
On top of the arguable impropriety of personally profiting off of his donors’ and his party’s largesse, the situation presents perverse incentives for Trump. Already, elected officials, up to and including the president, to an extent base their behavior in office on what they believe will play well with voters rather than (or, in the best-case scenario, on top of) what is best for America. This is certainly true of Trump, whose every decision seems to prompt discussion of how it plays into the tension between his nationalist base and traditional Republican voters.
The personal financial benefits of campaigning mean that Trump has a little more motivation to delve into his reelection efforts than most politicians in his position. Because he is personally profiting, he has another reason to aim his politics toward his base so that they will continue donating to him and buying his merchandise in the downtime between election years. Moreover, rather than stockpile for 2020, he has an incentive to keep up the campaign rallies—and keep charging for them, as he did in 2016—so that he can continue funneling money from his donors and voters into his personal businesses.
Moreover, that the president is redirecting donors’ money into his own businesses only further highlights the inadequacy of the trust arrangement he has set up to supposedly prevent him from conflicts of interest. Trump and his lawyers have claimed that, by resigning from his positions within the Trump Organization and handing over control to his two adult sons and a long-time business associate, the president has distanced himself from his businesses enough that he will no longer be tempted to act in his own financial interests. Ethics experts (and common sense) immediately disagreed: Unless the president actually sells his businesses, many have said, and has the funds reinvested without his knowledge, he still knows more than enough about his sources of profit to put his own personal gain above that of the country. The almost $500,000 he’s channeled into the Trump Organization via his reelection campaign demonstrates this: Trump doesn’t need to be in charge of his businesses to know how to direct money their way; all he needs to know is where they are.
That Second Hotel in Washington, D.C.There may soon be more than one Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. According to The Washington Post, the Trump Organization is considering purchasing another property in the nation’s capital to develop for its recently created Scion brand, which aims to offer a more affordable alternative to the upscale properties bearing the president’s name.
Unlike the Trump International Hotel—the upscale property that opened in September 2016 and has become something of a synecdoche for the president’s conflicts of interest—a new Scion hotel in D.C. would likely be a licensing deal. That means that, rather than the Trump Organization owning and operating the property itself, a third-party hotelier will be paying the president’s company for the right to use the Scion name; candidates identified by the Post include Foxhall Partners, which has two properties in the city and a third under development, and the Beacon Hotel in downtown D.C.
But even if it isn’t actually owned or operated by the Trump Organization, the new hotel would likely attract scrutiny along the same lines as the Trump International. A licensing agreement means that the president will not be profiting off of the building directly; payments from individuals or organizations booking rooms or events there will not go straight to the Trump Organization, but to the hotelier. But Trump will still have a financial stake in the hotel’s viability: The longer it stays in business and the more successful it is, the more (and longer) the licensee will pay to use the Scion name, and the more likely other owners may be to commit to similar partnerships with the fledgling brand. Trump has resigned from his positions with the Trump Organization and transferred control of his assets to his two adult sons and a long-time business partner. But he still owns the company, which means he will still profit from his properties. According to his son Eric, the president will even continue to receive quarterly reports on how his real-estate empire is faring financially. The pathway to Trump’s pocketbook may be slightly more complicated, but it still exists.
The proposed new property also engenders some of the same concerns as the broader round of expansions the Trump Organization announced in February. Developing a hotel, even in an existing building, means working with local government bureaucracies, such as zoning offices that sign off on structural changes or licensing boards. In any city, this would create conflicting incentives for government officials who are suddenly being asked to rule on the president’s businesses. On the one hand, Washington, D.C., like many of the cities into which the Trump Organization is looking to expand, voted strongly against the president in the 2016 election; city officials, especially those elected by D.C.’s denizens, may feel a need to factor his unpopularity into their decisions with regard to the newly proposed hotel. On the other hand, the federal government still controls D.C.’s budget, placing additional pressure to green-light a proposal from the infamously mercurial commander-in-chief.
That Property in AzerbaijanWhen it comes to President Donald Trump’s constellation of foreign investments, properties, and companies, much of the attention so far has been on his business’s apparent violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars officeholders from taking gifts from foreign leaders. According to numerous ethics experts, the clause takes an expansive definition of gifts, encompassing everything from a direct bribe to a foreign official’s approval of construction of a new Trump property. But some of the Trump Organization’s properties raise additional red flags due to the specific partners involved. That’s true in Indonesia, for example, where Trump’s affiliates have been involved in bribery scandals and radical Islamic nationalist parties, and Brazil, where the company pulled out of a branding agreement amid a criminal investigation of a local business partner.
Such is the case in Azerbaijan, which Transparency International ranks as among the most corrupt countries in the world, where the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Baku remains unopened. Though the long-stalled development has generated a steady drip of news and rumors for years, an overview by Adam Davidson in The New Yorker, entitled “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” puts into perspective just how convoluted the situation is, and just how much the project has led Trump and his company into a partnership with numerous corrupt officials in the Middle East. The details suggest that, on top of the continual underlying breach of the emoluments clause, the Trump Organization’s involvement may also violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, which forbids American companies from participating, even unknowingly, in bribery schemes in other countries, with a penalty of up to $2 million and up to five years in jail.
According to Davidson, though the project originated in 2008 as a high-end apartment building, the Trump Organization has had a licensing deal with the building’s Azerbaijani developers to turn the property into a hotel since 2012. Though the Trump Organization presented the deal as a straightforward licensing agreement, it was in fact a much more involved agreement granting the company—specifically, Trump’s daughter Ivanka—extensive oversight over the project. Based on his FEC disclosures in 2016, which as of this moment remain the only official record of Trump’s finances, the president has so far made $2.8 million from the partnership.
But what makes this story unique among the dozens of ethical questions surrounding the president is the Trump Organization’s partners on the project. Ostensibly, the main developer behind the property is Anar Mammadov. He is in turn the son of Azerbaijan’s transportation minister Ziya Mammadov, who was once described in a leaked diplomatic cable as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.” Also in on the deal, though not initially publicly disclosed, is Ziya’s brother Elton, who founded the company that currently owns the property in Baku while serving in Azerbaijan’s parliament. Then there’s the Mammadovs’ relationships with Iranian oligarchs. For years, the Mammadovs have been closely linked with the Darvishis, whose members include the head of a construction firm implicated in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s possibly illicit financial operations and the former leader of a company that was sanctioned by the United States for its role in Iran’s attempts to develop an arsenal of nuclear missiles. As the Mammadovs’ influence within Azerbaijan has begun to weaken in recent years, they have increased both their wealth and their mutually profitable relationship with the Darvishis, green-lighting a number of deals that will prove lucrative for both families.
Alan Garten, the chief legal officer for the Trump Organization, asserted to The New Yorker that, as the company has never worked directly with Ziya or Elton Mammadov, it has not engaged in any behavior that should trip ethical alarms. He has additionally claimed that the company did “extensive due diligence” in making the deal, which did not raise “any red flags,” although the actual employees who carried out the process are no longer with the company.
Still, merely by partnering with the Mammadov family, the Trump Organization may have violated the FCPA. The law explicitly covers cases in which an American company claims not to have known it was working with corrupt officials; jurisprudence since its 1977 passage has further expanded the law’s definition to include “conscious avoidance,” or active efforts by an American company to not learn of a foreign partner’s corruption. So though Garten claims that, since the Trump Organization did not have enough control over the project and has not itself engaged in bribery, its hands are essentially clean, experts on the law say that the Trump Organization may be legally liable if its foreign partners engaged in corrupt practices.
Adding to all this is the fact that Trump is on the record as opposing the FCPA in May 2012, right when it would have become relevant to his company’s engagement in Azerbaijan. Trump called the law “absolutely horrible” and argued that, since other countries do not have the same provision, American corporations are at a major disadvantage in which bribery is the norm. Trump’s appointee to the Securities and Exchange Commission (which enforces the statute), Jay Clayton, similarly considers the FCPA an obstacle to U.S. companies seeking to expand abroad. A dissenting voice on the topic is Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who stated in his confirmation hearings that he intends to continue enforcing the statute. Which of these voices will end up winning out on the topic remains an open question.
This, then, is the situation in which the Trump Organization—and, by extension, the president, who has stepped down from his position within the business but who retains ownership—finds itself in Azerbaijan: The company’s direct partner on Trump Tower Baku is the scion of a wealthy and notoriously corrupt family that appears to have only stepped up its self-dealing as its political power wanes. That family is engaged in what appears to be a relationship of mutual graft with Iranian oligarchs with deep connections to their country’s Revolutionary Guard, the ideological militia widely suspected by the international community of gross corruption and sponsoring terror at home and abroad.
These families can be added to the ever-growing list of international partners whose relationships with the Trump Organization could create conflicts of interest for the president. The Mammadovs’ arrangement with Trump’s company may not only violate the emoluments clause but could also feasibly put the president and his family in legal trouble should the SEC choose to actively pursue enforcement of the FCPA in Azerbaijan. And the Darvishis could in turn use their relationship to influence the Mammadovs, which could have significant implications should Trump attempt, as he has said he will, to take hard-line stances that could affect the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s activities. And if Trump so chooses, he could direct the Justice Department to curtail its enforcement of the FCPA or even use his bully pulpit to lead a legislative push to undo it, essentially condoning unethical behavior that in many countries enables leaders to personally profit at the expense of their own citizens—which, of course, could be a fair way to characterize the current situation with Trump’s business holdings.
That Trump Tower PenthouseWith President Trump in office and still refusing to distance himself from his businesses, every new tenant in one of his buildings creates another possibility of a conflict of interest. Such is the case with Xiao Yan Chen, who also goes by Angela Chen, a business executive who, according to documents filed with the New York City Department of Finance, purchased a $15.8 million penthouse apartment at Trump Tower in New York on February 21. Chen’s transaction is the first notable real-estate deal involving one of Trump’s properties since the election, although it should be noted that she has lived in a different unit in Trump Tower since 2004. And though Trump has officially removed himself from the board of directors of Trump Park Avenue LLC, the corporation that runs Trump Tower, he remains the company’s owner, meaning that he profits from its dealings.
Chen’s purchase represents the exact kind of entanglement that has fueled concerns that Trump’s financial interests could influence his decision-making as president. Chen is the founder and managing director of Global Alliance Associates, a consulting firm that, according to its website, “facilitates the right strategic relationships with the most prominent public and private decision makers in China.” The firm is explicit about what it sells: access. Though the page listing its partnerships is currently empty, the firm’s “affiliates” page includes a number of international organizations promoting relationships between private corporations and the governments of the United States and China, including the USA-China Chamber of Commerce, the Asia Society, and the China Institute. Notably, Global Alliance Associates also consults for the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Trade & Development Agency, meaning that Trump is accepting money from the founder and managing director of a firm that works with the U.S government.
Because Trump is holding onto his businesses, he has created a situation in which some of his earnings include money from the leader of a company whose sole goal is to help its clients curry favor with the Chinese government; it’s no stretch to believe that her move to Trump Tower and the money it puts in Trump’s pocket may help her gain access to the United States government. (Reached for comment by the New York Post, Chen said she was “not comfortable” discussing the purchase and its possible ramifications for her company.) Even if it wasn’t Chen’s intention, the transaction still could influence the president. As the president’s conflicts of interest continually accumulate, the likelihood that one or more will eventually impact his decision-making continually grows—as does the appearance that he is ethically compromised by the many people, organizations, and governments from which he is receiving money while in office.
That Resort in the Dominican RepublicThe Trump Organization’s January 11 pledge that it would no longer be pursuing new deals in foreign countries is looking increasingly toothless. Shortly after President Donald Trump took office, The Guardian reported that the president’s business would be moving forward with a planned expansion of its golf course in Aberdeen. Now, the Associated Press has reported that the company is working on a licensing deal in the Dominican Republic.
As was true with the Aberdeen plans, the Trump Organization has provided a narrow justification under which it argues that the news does not violate its promise. Technically, it argues, the deal is not new: The Trump Organization has had a contract with Ricardo and Fernando Hazoury, the brothers who own the Cap Cana Resort in the Dominican Republic, since 2007. But the financial crisis and disagreements between the Trump family and the Hazoury brothers, which climaxed with Eric Trump accusing the pair of “textbook fraud” in a 2012 lawsuit, had stalled the arrangement for nearly a decade, and the two parties haven’t written a new contract since the 2007 deal was struck. Even other real-estate developers have said that the resumption of the relationship between the Trumps and Hazourys caught them by surprise. For their part, the Hazourys have said that the relationship with the Trumps “remains incredibly strong, especially with Eric, who has led this project since its conception.”
The development in the Dominican Republic epitomizes the way the Trump Organization seems intent to violate the spirit of their “no new foreign deals” pledge, and arguably even the letter. Asked about the Organization’s justification for the deal, Richard Painter, who served as the ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, noted that the company “can take the tiniest little past involvement in something and then extend it into an enormous new deal” and hasn’t presented a meaningful way “to distinguish between new business and old business.” Already, the Trump Organization has provided excuses for moving forward with two projects based on an interpretation of its own pledge that seems predicated on the idea that a deal can only be described as “new” if there had never been any relationship whatsoever between the Trump family and the property in question. As the company finds more explanations to broaden what initially seemed to be a clear-cut policy to reduce conflicts of interest—arguably, the only step in Trump’s plan that actually would have helped him do so—the pledge will likely become increasingly meaningless.
The Cap Cana story is yet another conflict of interest that only became public because of reporting from local media—and because of the nonchalance with which the Trump family handles the relationship between their business and the presidency. The first outlet to report on Eric’s trip was the Dominican newspaper Diario Libre, shortly after Cap Cana posted a picture of the Hazourys with Eric on its website. This follows stories like the president’s phone call with the president of Argentina and his company’s plans to expand into Taiwan, both of which were similarly broken by local newspapers before getting picked up by American press outlets. Further, like the president’s post-election meeting with business partners from India and Eric’s trip to Uruguay, the Trump family’s propensity for photo ops played a role: Even amid intensifying scrutiny of the Trump Organization’s actions, Eric seems unworried about having not only taken the trip but also taken pictures with his business partners.
The president’s putative pick for his ambassador to the Dominican Republic only adds to the perception that Trump will intermingle business and politics in the country. Trump has picked Robin Bernstein, a campaign donor, business partner, and founding member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, to be his administration’s representative in the country. Bernstein and her husband Richard have been in business with the president and his company for decades through The Americas Group, a consulting and marketing firm focused on construction projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. Choosing personal friends and supporters to be ambassadors is relatively common, especially in countries with which the United States has relatively uncomplicated relations. However, Trump’s decision to appoint somebody with whom he has long maintained a financial relationship—his second such appointment, after having named fellow billionaire real-estate developer and business partner Steven Roth to head his infrastructure program—suggests a continued willingness to blur the lines between his endeavors as a businessman and his duties as president, all while contributing to the perception that the president is willing to reward those who have done business with him in the past.
That Chinese TrademarkOn February 15, President Trump scored a long-sought-after victory when a Chinese court ruled in his favor in a trademark dispute. In the case, which dragged on for more than a decade, the Trump Organization won sole rights to use the president’s name on products in the country, which would help prevent a bevy of unrelated entrepreneurs from applying it to a wide range of products, from toilets to clothing to condoms to explosives.
Almost immediately, Trump’s critics pointed out that the ruling poses a clear conflict of interest. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California called the trademark decision “deeply troubling,” adding, “If this isn’t a violation of the emoluments clause, I don’t know what is.” Some, including Feinstein, went further in their assertions: Only days before, Trump had apparently reversed one of his stances toward China by offering a full-throated endorsement of the “One China Policy” (under which countries officially recognize the mainland Chinese government but not Taiwan), leading to the suggestion that the court’s decision was part of a quid-pro-quo deal between the two governments.
Additional context, though, complicates this picture. The case, it turns out, was largely resolved in November 2016, before there was any indication that the president would waffle on the One China Policy by calling the president of Taiwan, and was the culmination of more than a decade of litigation that largely predates Trump’s involvement in politics. Conflicts of this kind over trademarks are fairly common in China, and, though resolving such cases often costs companies significant time and money, the Trump Organization’s victory is one of several that have gone in favor of American corporations in recent years. None of this rules out the possibility of a quid-pro-quo arrangement, but in sum it suggests that there is more to the case than what Feinstein alleges.
Whether or not the Chinese government tried to curry favor with the president by seeing to it that the court ruled in his favor, Trump’s newly awarded trademark poses a conflict of interest that could impact his future interactions with China. On top of the questions around his adherence, or lack thereof, to the One China Policy, Trump has taken a number of controversial stands when it comes to China, from accusing the country of currency manipulation to threatening to take hard-line trade positions that experts worry could lead to a trade war. Over all of these questions will loom the president’s knowledge that, with its trademark now secured, his company has an ongoing profitable relationship with the Chinese government—which, even if Trump does not proactively consider it in approaching the negotiating table, could provide his Chinese counterparts with leverage to influence the president’s decisions.
That Meeting at Mar-a-LagoOf his first three weekends in office, President Donald Trump spent two of them away from Washington, D.C., at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. On his first trip to the resort, which he has dubbed his “Winter White House,” Trump spent time on the golf course, attended a ball held by the Red Cross—a federally chartered organization over which he will likely be tasked to wield authority while in office—and held a Super Bowl party at which he hobnobbed with wealthy patrons.
His third weekend in office, Trump brought a guest of honor along with him: the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe. After first meeting with Abe at the real White House, Trump took his Japanese counterpart to Florida for a weekend on the links. The biggest controversy out of the weekend was over the president’s handling of a situation that developed on Saturday, February 11: As news of a North Korean missile test broke during dinner, Trump and Abe discussed the situation in public, using light from phones of gathered onlookers to read briefing documents, an incredibly lax approach to information security, particularly ironic given that Trump won in part because of his opponent’s own lapses in information security.
The situation perfectly encapsulates the way the president’s business interests are coming up against those of the country. Already, the Trump Organization’s decision to double Mar-a-Lago’s initiation fees led to accusations of profiteering, premised on the notion that people would be willing to pony up in the hopes of earning an audience with the commander-in-chief.
The events of Saturday, February 11 took the problem to a whole new level. By discussing the recently obtained intelligence with Abe without leaving the table, the president committed a breach of international-security protocol in a very public setting. Even had the meeting been taking place in the White House, Trump’s lackadaisical approach to information security would have been cause for concern; for self-evident reasons, briefings on urgent security situations do not typically happen in somewhat open settings around civilians. But on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, the situation becomes much more dangerous, because the patio is not a secure setting, and the administration does not appear to have taken measures to make it one. This is a perfect example of a conflict of interest in practice: Trump has an incentive to host an event at Mar-a-Lago (personal financial gain) that runs directly counter to what would be best for the country’s security (hosting the event at the White House or an otherwise secure location). Not only that, part of the appeal of Mar-a-Lago is that guests will have a front-row ticket to see Trump at work. Previous presidents like Barack Obama, meanwhile, took a more conventional, and far more secure, approach, setting up a mobile security perimeter known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, to ensure that nobody in the area could look in on or overhear the president’s dealings.
According to the president’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Mar-a-Lago does, in fact, have a SCIF on site that they used for the remainder of the Trump’s conversation about North Korea with Abe. That they apparently began their discussion at the dinner table before deploying the SCIF underscores the problem of the situation at Mar-a-Lago: Trump has a financial incentive to hold an open-air meeting like Saturday night’s to keep up the appearance that, by paying to be a member of his exclusive club, anyone can have access to the most powerful man in the world.
Who could have been present? The club’s membership list is private, meaning that the American public has no way of knowing who was around to overhear the conversation. (Two Democratic senators, Tom Udall and Sheldon Whitehouse, have introduced a bill to change this fact, but there is little evidence suggesting it has any hopes of passing through the Republican-held Congress.) Nor have the Trump Organization and White House been forthcoming as to how they intend to screen club members and employees for security clearance; though Udall and Whitehouse reached out to the administration to ask how Mar-a-Lago vets guests for security risks, but received no response. In such a public place, and without protective measures like a SCIF, there may not be anything to stop an agent of a foreign government or other malicious actor from paying the $200,000 initiation fee to stay at the club, effectively paying to be near to the president when he receives sensitive information. Unless Trump takes significant steps either to erect barriers between himself and the guests at Mar-a-Lago—which he certainly didn’t do this time, and which could reduce his ability to profit from the property—there is a real possibility that he will continue to compromise his country’s interests when he travels to his resort in Palm Beach.
One patron of the club, Richard DeAgazio, demonstrated just how much of a breakdown the situation represents. DeAgazio, who, according to a photo he posted on Facebook, joined the club in December after Trump’s election, snapped several pictures of the president and prime minister’s conversation, which helped corroborate a CNN report on the public nature of the ad-hoc meeting and details such as the use of cellphone flashlights to illuminate documents; he also took pictures with Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon and the president’s “body man,” whose job is in part to carry the “nuclear football” containing missile-launch codes (and who was initially identified by name in the photo’s caption). As if to reinforce impression that Mar-a-Lago members gain unprecedented access to the the president, even in the middle of a crisis situation, another patron was able to film Trump giving a toast at a wedding shortly after his press conference with Abe.
There is no reason to believe that DeAgazio had any intention of compromising international security with his pictures; he appears to simply be a wealthy Trump supporter who was excited at the chance to see his commander-in-chief in action and wanted photographs with which to remember the occasion. (He has since apparently either deleted his Facebook profile or increased his privacy settings so that it is no longer publicly accessible.) Nevertheless, he demonstrated just how Trump’s continued commingling of his business interests and his presidency places not just Americans but the entire global community in jeopardy.
In a way, the sheer enormity of the situation at Mar-a-Lago briefly crowded out the fact that merely bringing Abe to Mar-a-Lago demonstrates Trump’s conflicts of interest neatly. Though diplomatic meetings outside the White House are not unprecedented, Trump’s trip with Abe is likely the first instance of the president actually making money from such a meeting. Though Trump said that he was footing Abe’s bill, with both increased Secret Service presence and Abe’s retinue on hand, there’s a distinct possibility that, at some point in the weekend, somebody from the U.S. or Japanese government made a payment that ended up in Trump’s pocket. On top of that, the visit generated an inordinate amount of free publicity for Mar-a-Lago, which Trump repeatedly mentioned (and posted photos of) on his social media accounts and was continually noted in coverage of the weekend.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/08/donald-trump-conflicts-of-interests/508382/
