House Republicans have spent the last year desperately trying to impeach President Joe Biden over claims, for which they have produced zero evidence, that Biden has received payments from foreign governments while not in office. A new bombshell analysis reveals, however, that it is Donald Trump who has actually personally received payments from foreign governments — to the tune of millions of dollars while he was in the Oval Office.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a 156-page report on Thursday finding that Trump received at least $7.8 million from foreign governments while he was president, through his hotels and residential buildings that he refused to divest from while in office, despite clear conflicts of interest.
Analyzing financial documents from Mazars, Trump’s former accounting firm, the report lays out extensive evidence of payments from foreign governments, often in exchange for influence over Trump’s foreign policy decisions, showing the “unprecedented scope and scale” of Trump’s self-dealing while he was in office.
“President Donald Trump repeatedly and willfully violated the U.S. Constitution by failing to divest from his business empire and allowing his businesses to accept millions of dollars in payments from some of the most corrupt nations on earth,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement. “Each dollar former President Trump accepted violated the Constitution’s strict prohibition on payments from foreign governments, which the Founders enacted to prevent presidents from selling out U.S. foreign policy to foreign leaders.”
China was by far the largest spender at Trump’s businesses in the two years analyzed in the report, spending over $5.5 million through the Chinese embassy in the U.S., a major state-owned bank and the state-owned airline. In response, the report detailed, Trump showered praise on Chinese leaders, struck a seeming quid pro quo deal on his business’s trademarks in China, and even bragged about the state-owned bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, having its U.S. headquarters in the New York Trump Tower.
The second largest spender was Saudi Arabia, at $615,000, followed by Qatar, at $465,000. In all, the report details payments from 21 countries.
“Saudi Arabia, I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million,” Trump once said, as the report points out. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much!”
Due to Republicans’ blocking of the release of a range of Trump’s financial documents, the report’s scope is limited to only what Democrats could obtain before Republicans shut down the transfer of Trump’s financial documents to lawmakers when they took office, the report authors noted. This means it only includes two years of his presidency and analyzes payments made at only four of his over 500 businesses: Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, and Trump Tower and Trump World Tower in New York City.
Still, the findings are staggering, and are suggestive of a large-scale campaign of “rampant illegality and corruption” that Trump perpetuated while in office, the report says — the same type of corruption that Republicans are trying to remove Biden over despite having zero evidence.
“While the figures and constitutional violations in this report are shocking, we still don’t know the extent of the foreign payments that Donald Trump received — or even the total number of countries that paid him and his businesses while he was President — because Committee Chairman James Comer and House Republicans buried any further evidence of the Trump family’s staggering corruption,” Raskin said. “By concealing the evidence of Trump’s grift, House Republicans shamefully condone former President Trump’s past conduct.”
Indeed, other probes into Trump’s businesses have similarly found that Trump personally profited extensively from foreign governments while he was in office. Last year, a report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) examining tax and other financial records found that Trump made up to $160 million in business deals with foreign governments while in office.
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