Trump business deals revive questions about his family profiting off the presidency

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• Amna Nawaz:

  President Trump is on his way back from visiting three Middle Eastern nations, where the Trump family has deep business ties.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Over the past month, billions of dollars have poured into Trump-owned companies, reviving a longstanding ethical debate from his first term. Are the president's financial windfalls for his businesses influencing government policy?

  Our White House correspondent, Laura Barrón-López, has a look.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  On the first foreign trip of his second term, President Trump is once again paying special attention to the Middle East.

  Donald Trump, President of the United States: I'm honored to be the first American president ever to officially visit your great country.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  It's a region where the president's political and personal interests increasingly overlap.

• Donald Trump:

  I think it's a great gesture from Qatar. I appreciate it very much.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  The president's meetings in Qatar come just days after saying he would accept a major gift from the country, a new luxury jet to replace Air Force One.

• Donald Trump:

  I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer. I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, no, we don't want a free, very expensive airplane.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  But the jet, worth an estimated $400 million, has set off ethical and legal alarm bells.

  Noah Bookbinder, Executive Director, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington: It's entirely unprecedented. I'm certainly not aware of any kind of gift from a foreign nation that is even in the ballpark of this.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  Noah Bookbinder is the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and a former public corruption attorney for the Justice Department.

  Questions about Trump's potential use of the plane after he leaves office miss the larger conflict, Bookbinder says.

• Noah Bookbinder:

  Some of these transactions may turn out to be kind of just on the right side of the law. Some of them may well end up violating the Constitution. But even where there is technical legality, where you have a senior government official getting personal benefits from people who have every reason to want to influence their policy decisions, that's inherently corrupt.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  Trump placed his business interests in a trust controlled by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., rather than a blind trust like most modern presidents. But the jet is just the latest in a series of actions taken by the president and the Trump Organization, run by two of his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric, that flout ethics norms or enrich the Trump family.

  The family's budding cryptocurrency empire is at the top of that list, with some analysis estimating the president's crypto holdings now represent roughly 40 percent of his net worth.

• Eric Trump, Executive Vice President, Trump Organization:

  I believe that the crypto world is going to take over those big banks. I think it is going to leave them in the dust. And I think it's going to change our modern financial system forever.

  (Cheering)

• Laura Barrón-López:

  At a recent auction of Trump's cryptocurrency, bidders spent nearly $150 million Trump's meme coin, a form of cryptocurrency typically inspired by viral trends or endorsed by celebrities. The reward? For the top 220 bidders, a private gala with President Trump at his golf course just outside of Washington, D.C., and the top 25 will receive even more exclusive access to the president, including a special VIP tour of the White House.

• Noah Bookbinder:

  The profits from it go in large part to Donald Trump, both when the value of the coin goes up, but also there are transaction costs that he profits from when people buy and sell these coins.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  According to recent estimates, the Trump family and its partners have made some $320 million in trading fees since the president's meme coin launched. Four months into his second term, Trump and his family are rapidly finding new ways to potentially profit off of the presidency.

  If foreign governments or wealthy individuals want to curry favors with the president, there are four main avenues for them to do it, cryptocurrency, new real estate deals, Trump Media, which runs the president's social media app TRUTH SOCIAL, or direct payments at social clubs, hotels, and golf courses run by the Trump family.

  In addition to the president's meme coin, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., alongside Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump's Middle East envoy, are leading the Trump family's crypto firm known as World Liberty Financial.

• Eric Trump:

  Modern finance is absolutely broken. And so when the banks came after our family, I will never forget it. We became the most canceled people in the world all because we're associated with politics in the United States.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  The firm recently developed a stablecoin, a type of cryptocurrency that maintains a constant price of $1 and is meant to replace traditional money.

  And that Trump family crypto business just got a major $2 billion infusion from the government of the United Arab Emirates, a deal that will make the Trump family tens of millions of dollars per year from the investment.

• Eric Lipton, The New York Times:

  It's sort of impossible for us to know if it's influencing U.S. foreign policy. And that's pretty troubling and pretty unusual in American history that we would even have this question.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  Eric Lipton covers the president's business dealings for The New York Times. He says the family's crypto transactions make Trump's first-term conflicts appear small.

• Eric Lipton:

  So it's not just millions or hundreds of thousands,. We're talking billions of dollars that involve foreign governments, really enormous in scale compared to people buying martinis at the Trump Hotel in D.C. or going to Mar-a-Lago.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  All of this comes as the Trump administration has rolled back crypto regulations.

• Donald Trump:

  Thank you very much.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  Meanwhile, Trump's first international trip happens to be in the same region that the Trump Organization is planning to build an 80-floor hotel and residential tower.

• Eric Trump:

  We're going to come in here and build a crown jewel and everybody is going to know that's Trump International Hotel and Tower. That's Trump.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  And a new luxury complex in Qatar.

  Trump may not be technically running his companies, but he's the financial beneficiary, said Lipton. And outside of these new real estate projects, money is flowing in other ways.

• Eric Lipton:

  It's hard to keep track of all of the various moneymaking ventures that the Trump family is currently involved in that bring benefit in many cases to President Trump himself. There's his son who is selling $500,000-a-head private memberships at a new club that's about to open in Washington, D.C.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  That new club is called The Executive Branch and will give paying tech and business moguls some private face time with Trump administration officials in D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood.

• Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary:

  Good afternoon, everybody.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  The White House says everything is aboveboard.

• Karoline Leavitt:

  It's, frankly, ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, said Trump may not be breaking criminal conflicts of interest law.

  Richard Painter, Former Associate Counsel to President George W. Bush: It would be a crime for an executive branch official to participate in the regulation of cryptocurrency while holding cryptocurrency assets and investments in a trading platform for cryptocurrency. But that criminal statute does not apply to the president of the United States.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  But, Painter says, Trump is potentially violating a part of the Constitution known as the Emoluments Clause.

• Richard Painter:

  Foreign governments will always seek to try to influence the United States and our public officials. And if foreign governments can do business deals with the United States, public officials, private business deals, they could easily corrupt our government. And that is the danger we face today, as much as we faced it at the time of the founding of this country.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  The founding fathers, concerned that elected officials could profit from leadership, wrote a clause in the Constitution that prohibits the nation's leaders from accepting gifts, titles and funds from foreign governments.

• Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA):

  I'm going to leave it to the administration. They know much more about the details.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have largely brushed aside Trump's new overseas business deals and his growing cryptocurrency empire.

• Rep. Mike Johnson:

  Look, there are authorities that police executive branch ethics rules. I'm not an expert in that. Whatever the — President Trump is doing is out in the open. They're not trying to conceal anything.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  As for Qatar gifting a luxury jet, some of Trump's top MAGA allies were less forgiving.

• Ben Sapiro, Conservative Political Commentator:

  Taking sacks of goodies from people who support Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Jazeera, all the rest, that's not America first. If you want President Trump to succeed, this kind of skeezy stuff needs to stop.

• Richard Painter:

  The accountability for the president will come from Congress or not come from Congress.

• Laura Barrón-López:

  But, so far, the Republican-controlled Congress has shown no interest in conducting oversight of the president's ever-expanding business interests.

• Richard Painter:

  Financial conflicts of interest of the highest-ranking government officials do have consequences. When we face serious problems as a society, will those problems be resolved by our government or will our government officials simply focus on making money for themselves?

• Laura Barrón-López:

  It's a question ethics lawyers and government watchdogs will continue to ask as Trump and his family stand to make billions from his presidency.

  For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Laura Barrón-López.

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