WASHINGTON – Donald Trump’s businesses received nearly $8 million in payments from foreign governments while Trump was president, according to new research by Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Unlike Republicans in their effort to pin corruption on President Joe Biden, Democrats on the House oversight committee have receipts — more than 400 pages of them — showing payments to Trump’s businesses from foreign officials likely seeking to influence the U.S. government.
Trump refused to divest from his business empire when he became president, creating an opportunity for anyone hoping to win his favor to put money straight into his pocket by staying at his hotels.
“When he arrived in the White House, Trump was determined not only to keep this well-branded global corporate empire going but to seize a new and unprecedented opportunity to make it ever more lucrative for himself and his family,” the House oversight committee’s Democratic staff, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), said in their report.
“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 report said.
Democrats and nonpartisan ethics experts have long argued that Trump’s refusal to divest violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on presidents accepting gifts or “emoluments” from kings, princes or foreign states. Trump faced emoluments lawsuits but the Supreme Court declared the cases moot after he left the White House in January 2021.
Meanwhile, since 2019, Democrats on the House oversight committee have sought records from Trump’s accounting firm reflecting his foreign income. After a federal court awarded access in 2022, Democrats said they’d found records reflecting more than $750,000 in payments from foreign officials at Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C. Despite a court order requiring more material be turned over, Republicans quietly shut down document production last year as they launched their quest for dirt on Biden.
Thursday’s report represents the completion of the Democrats’ emoluments research. Using documents obtained by the court order plus already-public records, Democrats tallied $7.8 million in foreign payments from 20 countries during Trump’s presidency. Most of the sum came from Chinese sources, including China’s embassy in the U.S. and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a state-owned enterprise that leased property at Trump Tower in New York. Democrats suggest in their report that the payments from ICBC could have affected the Trump administration’s decision not to sanction the bank for ties to North Korea in 2017.
Though Democrats presented their report as a continuation of their investigation into Trump’s violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, it’s clearly intended as a rebuke of the impeachment inquiry against Biden. The House of Representatives could hold an impeachment vote sometime in the coming months.
Republicans have accused Biden of improperly benefiting from his son Hunter Biden’s business deals, through which the younger Biden received millions from foreign nationals in China and Ukraine during and after Joe Biden’s time as vice president. Republicans have said Joe Biden may have accepted foreign bribes through his son’s work.
The only problem with the allegations is that there’s not much proof. Republicans have sifted through years of Hunter Biden’s bank records without finding any significant cash flows to the president – except for four $1,380 transfers that were apparently reimbursements for truck payments the president made on his son’s behalf in 2018. House oversight committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) has said that because Hunter Biden’s money came from foreign sources, the payments to his father were tainted, even if they were loan reimbursements.
As HuffPost has previously reported, the foreign payments that went directly to businesses controlled by Trump himself might be better examples of the kind of corruption Republicans are talking about.