Watchdog sounds alarm that Trump's 'brazen' foreign business dealings will get worse

Donald Trump exploited the presidency in his first term to financially benefit himself and his family, ethics experts wrote Tuesday. And they warned the grifting would only get worse in a second term.

The former president raked in up to $160 million from business in foreign nations while in office, according to a recent estimate by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) that was shared with USA Today.

The news outlet reported that much of that income came from corrupt and authoritarian governments such as China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“We have to assume that not only would we see what we saw in the four years of his presidency, but that we'd see it a lot more and probably done a lot more brazenly,” said CREW president Noah Bookbinder.

Trump has been found liable for fraud, sexual abuse and defamation and penalized more than $530 million in damages, which Bookbinder said gives him even more incentive to do business overseas from the Oval Office.

“He's got a real need for it now," Bookbinder said.

CREW sued Trump in 2017 over his alleged violations of the Constitution's emoluments clause prohibiting officeholders from accepting certain items of value from foreign states without approval from Congress, but the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2021 because Trump was no longer in office, so they said the statute no longer applied to him.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told USA TODAY that Trump, "Divested and worked to be legally compliant during the first term [so] it would be safe to assume he will follow all rules and regulations" in a potential second term.

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The ex-president, "Entered into an ethics pledge that held him to a higher standard and more than what was required," Cheung added.

The House Oversight Committee's Democratic minority issued a report in January on Trump's foreign dealings as president titled, “White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump," after committee chairman James Comer (R-KY) released the former president's accounting firm its obligation to comply with the panel's subpoena.

"Despite the Constitution's requirement that a president disclose foreign emoluments and seek Congress's consent to keep them, it took Oversight Committee Democrats years of aggressive litigation against the former President to obtain the subset of documents from Mazars, Donald Trump's accounting firm," the report noted.

The committee found $7.8 million in foreign payments, with the largest amount coming from China, with limited data from just 20 countries and four of Trump's more than 500 businesses over two years, but Comer dismissed the findings even as he sought to impeach president Joe Biden over his family's foreign dealings.

“Former President Trump has legitimate businesses, but the Bidens do not,” Comer said in a statement responding to that report.

Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, warned from the outset of Trump's presidency that his dealings with foreign governments should be prohibited by the Constitution, and he said that danger has only grown larger since he left office.

“Financial conflicts of interest in foreign countries would be an even greater risk for a second Trump presidency than in the first. This is because Trump is deeply indebted with (his) civil fraud judgments and mounting legal bills in his criminal cases,” Painter said.

“Trump Organization financial dealings in foreign countries are as wide-reaching as they ever were, and most of these countries are not democracies. Some are not friendly to the United States.”