Donald Trump “repeatedly and willfully” violated the US constitution by “allowing his businesses to accept millions of dollars from some of the most corrupt nations on Earth”, prominently including China, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee charged on Thursday, unveiling a 156-page report on the matter. 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.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Businesses tied to Donald Trump received at least $7.8m in foreign payments from 20 countries during his four years in the White House, Democratic congressional investigators said on Thursday.
These countries spent – “often lavishly” – on apartments and hotel stays at properties owned by Trump’s family business empire, “personally enriching President Trump while he made foreign policy decisions connected to their policy agendas with far-reaching ramifications for the United States”, the report said.
Trump, a businessman before his election, broke with US precedent and did not divest from his businesses or put them into a blind trust when he took office, instead leaving his adult sons to manage them.
Shortly after Trump was elected to the presidency in 2016, Congress began investigating conflicts of interest and Trump’s potential violations of the emoluments clause of the US constitution, which bars the acceptance of presents from foreign states by a person holding federal elected office without congressional consent.
The investigation led to a lengthy court dispute, which ended in a settlement in 2022, at which point Trump’s accounting firm began producing the requested documents.
When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives early last year, the committee stopped requiring Trump’s accounting firm to produce documents and a US district court ended the litigation.
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