WASHINGTON (CN) — Democrats on the House’s government oversight panel kicked off the election year Thursday with a scathing report accusing former President Donald Trump of sidestepping Congress and taking money from foreign governments via his various businesses.
Lawmakers, led by Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, contended in the sweeping report that Trump companies received at least $7.8 million from a laundry list of foreign countries including China and Saudi Arabia.
According to the report, Chinese government sources spent nearly $5.6 million at the former president’ properties while he was in office, including at New York’s Trump Tower and at Trump hotels in Las Vegas and Washington. The Saudi Arabian government poured in just over $600,000 at the Trump World Tower in New York and Washington’s former Trump International Hotel.
Such payments, Democrats said, “clearly violated the Constitution’s prohibition against a president’s acceptance of foreign state emoluments without Congress’ consent.” Trump’s business interests provided an “irresistible entry point” for foreign influence over U.S. foreign policy, the report added.
The Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause bars political officeholders from accepting gifts or payments “of any kind whatever” from foreign governments without permission from Congress.
In remarks provided at the beginning of the report, Raskin argued that Democrats’ findings demonstrate the need for stronger laws to “deal with a president who is willing to brazenly convert the presidency into a business for self-enrichment.”
The Maryland Democrat also pledged that he and his colleagues would bring forward legislative reforms to accomplish those ends. “Oversight Committee Democrats are prepared to act in defense of the Constitution,” he wrote.
Thursday’s report comes just days into an election year and weeks before the first presidential primary elections in Iowa, in which former President Trump is far and away the leading candidate for the Republican nomination.
Although Democrats framed their inquiry as an effort to highlight loopholes in current law and shine a light on the former president’s alleged misconduct, some experts were skeptical that the report would have any significant impact on policy — or politics.
“I think a lot of what was in there was already known,” said Patricia Crouse, a practitioner in residence and adjunct professor at the University of New Haven. “The amount is a little bit staggering, but I don’t think there’s any real surprise in the idea that he was making money off the presidency.”
Crouse opined that there was likely little to be done to hold the former president accountable for alleged emoluments violations. The Supreme Court, she pointed out, has refused to rule on the matter, pointing to the high court’s 2021 decision to halt an emoluments lawsuit after Trump left office.
“It does give then Democrats another talking point,” Crouse said of the report, predicting that its findings would add to an arsenal of conduct some lawmakers say should disqualify Trump from the presidency. “I just don’t know what kind of impact it will have.”
Crouse was also unconvinced by Democrats’ call to legislative action, saying that even if a bill clamping down on foreign emoluments were to pass Congress, she had “no faith” lawmakers would enforce such a measure.
“It’s not just Trump that benefits from foreign money,” she said. “I don’t think he’s the cause of the problem, I think he’s just amplified it.”
Meanwhile, Michael McConnell, director of the Stanford University Constitutional Law Center, took issue with Democrats’ central premise, saying that it seems “exceedingly unlikely” that Trump’s business dealings violated foreign emoluments restrictions.
“The standard meaning of an emolument is a payment for personal services,” McConnell said. Foreign governments spending money at Trump properties does not fit that definition, he argued, and any other interpretation would be “too expansive.”
“It’s very unlikely that that kind of arm’s length business transaction would be regarded as an emolument,” McConnell contended. “That would mean that no company a president owns, even in part, would be able to do business in foreign countries.”
McConnell also suggested the Democrats’ report was aimed at reviving emoluments allegations surrounding former President Trump as a way of diverting attention from House Republicans’ impeachment probe into the Biden family’s business dealings — which has yet to tie President Joe Biden to any wrongdoing.
House Democrats, though, were quick to compare their report to the GOP’s ongoing investigation into Biden.
“I’m proud to say that this is oversight done right,” wrote California Representative Katie Porter in a Thursday post on X, formerly Twitter, “unlike the GOP’s baseless impeachment inquiry.”
Even if Trump faces no recourse for allegedly running afoul of foreign emoluments restrictions, the former president’s legal troubles are mounting as the 2024 election season heats up — including a litany of federal charges related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump is also challenging two states, Maine and Colorado, which elected to strike the former president from their primary ballots, citing the insurrection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
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