House Democrats are accusing former President Donald Trump of taking in more than $7.8 million from foreign governments via payments to the Trump Organization while he was in the White House.
A majority of that came from the Chinese government and state-owned entities, Democrats said, while the rest came from 19 other countries, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar.
Minority staff on the House Oversight Committee released a 156-page report on Thursday detailing claims that the former president repeatedly violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which states that federal officials may not accept gifts or cash from foreign state actors without Congressional approval.
“After promising ‘the greatest infomercial in political history,’ former 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,” the top Democrat on the committee Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said.
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“The limited records that the Committee obtained show that while Donald Trump was in office, he received more than $5.5 million from the Chinese government and Chinese state-owned enterprises, as well as millions more from 19 other foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia through just four of the more than 500 entities he owned.”
Along with the report, Oversight Democrats also produced more than 400 pages, some redacted, of documents from Mazars USA LLC — Trump’s former accounting firm.
They accused the former president of allowing his businesses to profit off of foreign cash while suggesting he provided benefits to those countries in return.
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Much of the investigation appears to have focused on the Trump Organization’s hotels in Las Vegas, New York, and Washington, D.C., as well as Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Some of the payments appear to be linked to short-term hotel stays while Trump was in office, like room and dining fees.
Other cashflows are for longer-term arrangements. The report said that Trump received more than $615,000 from Saudi Arabia while in office, both through its lease of the 45th floor of Trump Tower and through stays at Trump International Hotel in DC.
The Indian government spent at least $282,764 on Trump properties during his administration, including the cost of two units of Trump Tower.
It’s not immediately clear whether all of the contracts or agreements on the Trump Tower payments were made before the former president took office or started his 2016 campaign. The report noted that Mazars only handed over information for Trump Tower for the year 2018.
A spokesperson for the Trump Organization pointed out that Beijing-backed bank ICBC “was a tenant who signed a 20 year office lease in a Trump Tower in 2008, almost a decade before President Trump entered office.”
The spokesperson also said “foreign profits were donated in full to the United States Treasury for patronage at our properties while President Trump was in office.”
“The house democrats are desperate to save face for Hunter Biden but there there is a large difference between someone who leases commercial office space to a foreign company a decade ago (in 2008 to be exact) versus the son and family members of the Vice President extracting money from China, Ukraine and Romania and others while providing no apparent or tangible goods and services. It would be dishonest to not clearly distinguish between the two,” the spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
“We do not have the ability or viability to stop someone from booking through third parties — Expedia etc — hence the voluntary donation of profits on an annual basis which has been covered ad nauseam.”
The report conceded that the overall findings were based on just a fraction of Trump’s accounting records — and Raskin blamed Republicans for their inability to get the rest.
“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.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., responded to Fox News Digital: “It’s beyond parody that Democrats continue their obsession with former President Trump. Former President Trump has legitimate businesses but the Bidens do not.”
“The Bidens and their associates made over $24 million by cashing in on the Biden name in China, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Romania. No goods or services were provided, other than access to Joe Biden and the Biden network,” Comer said.
He’s one of three committee chairs currently leading an impeachment inquiry of President Biden, specifically looking into whether he and his family profited off of foreign business deals while he was vice president.
In addition to the payments listed above, Democrats accused Trump of taking in $465,744 from Qatar for Trump Tower, $303,372 from Kuwait toward Trump Tower and Trump’s D.C. hotel and $248,962 from Malaysia spent at the D.C. hotel.
