Former U.S. president Donald Trump’s businesses received at least US$7.8 million in foreign payments from 20 countries when he was serving in the White House, a new report from congressional Democrats revealed Thursday.
Most of that money — US$5.6 million — came from China, according to the report from U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee Democrats.
Yet they noted the report was based on partial information provided by Trump’s accounting firm, and that the payments may be “a small slice” of what foreign governments paid to Trump’s family businesses during his administration.
Trump was able to personally benefit from these payments by not fully divesting from his businesses while president, the report argues.
“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,” the report said.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malaysia were among the countries whose governments and entities spent money at Trump-owned properties, the report said.
“It’s not the least bit surprising,” said Matthew Lebo, a political science professor at Western University who studies American politics.
No Republicans were involved in the report, which was released as a House impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden is expected to accelerate when Congress returns from a holiday break next week.
The inquiry, which was formally approved by the House along party lines last month, is based on allegations that Biden and his family enriched themselves with payments from China and other foreign governments in exchange for policy actions when Biden was vice president.
The White House has denied wrongdoing, and Republicans have yet to produce any evidence that Biden himself acted improperly.
The report criticizes the House Oversight Committee chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, for shutting down the Democrats’ investigation into Trump’s finances when they took control of the House last year. The committee stopped requiring Trump’s accounting firm to produce documents and a U.S. District Court ended the litigation.
Comer dismissed the report’s findings in a statement to Reuters.
“It’s beyond parody that Democrats continue their obsession with former President Trump,” Comer said. “Former President Trump has legitimate businesses but the Bidens do not.”
Lebo agreed that Democrats will likely use the report to undermine the impeachment inquiry against Biden, but noted it would have been dismissed as partisan no matter when it was released.
“This investigation has been going on for a long time … and whatever Republicans who would have joined in on this are out of Congress now, because you can’t be a Republican in Congress and be investigating Trump,” he said.
What the report details
Trump, a businessman before his election, broke with U.S. precedent and did not divest from his businesses or put them into a blind trust when he took office, instead leaving his adult sons to manage them.
The trust he did set up was overseen by Donald Trump Jr. and Allen Weisselberg, then the CFO of the Trump Organization.
Documents made public in 2017, shortly after Trump entered the White House, and cited in the report revealed Trump could access and draw money from the trust “at his request.”
Shortly after Trump was elected to the presidency in 2016, Congress began probing conflicts of interests and Trump’s potential violations of the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, which bars the acceptance of presents from foreign states by a person holding federal elected office without congressional consent.
The investigation led to a lengthy court dispute, which ended in a settlement in 2022, at which point Trump’s accounting firm began producing the requested documents. The following year, Comer supported Trump’s move to end the litigation.
The report discusses four properties, less than 1 per cent of the 558 corporate entities Trump owned either directly or indirectly as president. Trump’s accounting firm did not provide documents regarding at least 80 per cent of Trump’s business entities, congressional investigators said.
Yet the small sampling of foreign payments is connected in the report to policy decisions Trump made while president. Those include declining to sanction the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China for doing business with North Korea in violation of U.S. sanctions, despite Republican pressure to do so.
Trump also signed an arms deal in 2017 worth over $100 billion with Saudi Arabia, whose government and entities spent US$615 million at Trump properties during his presidency, according to the report.
The report says Trump repeatedly violated the federal emoluments clause that requires presidents to report any foreign contributions to Congress.
“Through his pervasive violations of the clause, Trump in effect sought to govern as a get-rich-quick king, rather than an elected president acting in the exclusive fiduciary interest of the people,” the report said.
The report’s release comes as Trump seeks to regain the presidency in the 2024 election. He is the leading candidate to secure the Republican nomination and is expected to face off against Biden in a rematch of the 2020 campaign.
The report is unlikely to impact Trump’s electoral chances, experts say.
“There’s already 91 felony charges (against Trump), and people who are not convinced by any of those won’t be convinced by this,” Lebo said.
—with files from Reuters