Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) is out with a blockbuster report detailing how foreign governments spent millions at Trump properties while the felonious fraudster was in office. The report also notes some of the ways in which Donald Trump used the office of the presidency to return the favor(s).
From CREW:
During Trump’s presidency, CREW tracked what ultimately became thousands of conflicts of interest swirling around him and his businesses—an unheard of level of corruption caused by Trump’s unprecedented refusal to divest his business empire. Trump spent his time as president promoting the businesses he profited from while in office and rewarded the patrons who lined his pockets, both foreign and domestic, with access and influence in his administration.
Prior to taking office and throughout his tenure in the White House, the Trump administration and the Trump Organization claimed that Trump had sufficiently dealt with the conflicts caused by foreign income by donating the company’s revenue from foreign government sources to the U.S. Treasury. However, according to reporting late in his presidency, the company only donated $448,000—a fraction of the $13.6 million in payments documented here.
The CREW report stresses that the $13.6 million is an extremely conservative estimate. For one thing, it does not include items such as trademarks Trump was awarded from China, Brazil and the UAE, e.g., because they are hard to quantify. It also does not include tens of millions of dollars Trump got from foreign businesses that can’t be traced back to government sources. Nor does it include the likely illegal, quacks-like-a-bribe $10 million Trump got from Egypt.
But what is included is extremely damning. For example, the dough from China: CREW calculated then-President Trump received $5.7 million from Chinese government sources via patronage of Trump Tower, Trump Hotel DC and Trump Hotel Las Vegas. The Chinese seem to have gotten what they paid for:
[The $5.7 million from China] also includes $195,662 paid to Trump Hotel Las Vegas by Chinese state-owned enterprise Hainan Airlines, for a 14-month stay beginning on November 4, 2016, … as well as at least $5,357,495 in rent from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) at Trump Tower.
At the time of the spending, HNA Group, an affiliate of Hainan Airlines, sought to improve its image in DC and gain US government approval of its targeted acquisitions. HNA executives enjoyed access to high-level Trump administration officials, like Vice President Mike Pence and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. While ICBC was spending at Trump businesses the bank came under scrutiny for doing business with front companies working for North Korea, benefitting North Korea’s sanctioned nuclear program. Despite widespread evidence of dealings with North Korea and calls from the Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee for the Trump Administration to “apply maximum financial and diplomatic pressure” on Chinese banks that do business with North Korea, Trump did not take any action against the bank.
There was also a $5,377 deposit in 2017 to Trump’s Las Vegas hotel for an event in January 2018, by Chinese state-controlled telecommunications giant Huawei:
The US government has long considered Huawei to be a national security threat, and officials continued to sound the alarm about the company while it was doing business with Trump. While officials in Congress and the Trump Administration took a hard line against Huawei and other “Chinese companies operating in a manner contrary to U.S. national security,” Trump did the opposite, and announced that he would remove Huawei from the Department of Commerce’s “blacklist” of foreign companies not allowed to buy American products without US government approval. While Huawei remained on the blacklist, the Trump administration granted six temporary licenses allowing it to do business with American companies.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg both from China (the government granted Trump’s company approval for 46 trademarks while he was in office) and from other countries.
I highly recommend reading the full report. It reveals a shocking level of corruption we already know about and it hints there’s plenty we don’t yet know. More importantly, it’s a warning that if Felon Trump should get back into office, he’d happily sell out the country to the highest bidder willing to enrich him. Again.
