New York Times reporter Eric Lipton says the Trump family businesses, including their crypto company, are capitalizing on the President's position, and creating unprecedented conflicts of interest.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
What are the conflicts of interest involving President Trump?
Hasn't Trump said that he is immune from conflicts of interest?
I mean, in fact, that is true. The President of the United States and the Vice President are the only two members of the executive branch that are exempt from a federal criminal law that makes it a crime to take an action that brings you or your family direct financial benefit. I mean, so that's a criminal offense.
If you do that, if you are an employee of the federal government and you take an action that specifically benefits your family, that's a federal crime and you could go to jail for that. And the president is exempt from that because the president's powers are so broad, I guess the presumption is that you can't prevent the president from doing something that might benefit his family financially.
But historically, despite that exemption, presidents from both parties have – taken steps to avoid conflicts of interest by either selling off assets, putting assets into a blind trust in which they don't have any control, or trying to avoid, you know, their family being involved in financial efforts that create obvious conflicts of interest.
Now, there have been throughout history relatives of presidents that have drawn attention because of their business activities. I mean, Billy Carter, the brother of Jimmy Carter, Neil Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, obviously Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, have been engaged in business activities that have drawn assertions of conflicts of interest.
And in many cases, they were well substantiated. But when I speak with various historians who have examined these things, and as a reporter, I've looked at them myself, I've never seen so many simultaneous activities as we're seeing now with the Trump sons and President Trump himself through his financial benefits, as they're playing out right now before us.
So we talked about the Trump family cryptocurrency business. Let's look at the Trump family real estate business and developments it's working on in foreign countries. Last month, Eric Trump visited Gulf states, including the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, working on real estate developments there. And he met with Saudi leaders, too.
So if you could choose one of those real estate developments that Eric Trump was discussing and tell us about the potential conflicts you see there.
Yeah. I mean, the thing that really is problematic is when they are doing deals that involve government entities. So, for example, they have a business partner in the Middle East called Dar Global, and they now have six ongoing real estate projects with them, most of them in the Middle East.
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