Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Jamie Raskin: I’m delighted to be with you, Greg.
Reporter (audio voiceover): Mr. President, what do you say to people who view that luxury jet as a personal gift to you? Why not leave it behind?
Sargent: Congressman, Trump is very angry that anyone would dare question his integrity. And he seems to think the White House should just accept this the way a golfer would accept a free putt. Your response to what Trump said there?
They violated not just the foreign emoluments clause, but the domestic emoluments clause in taking millions from the Secret Service and other federal agencies and departments when they stayed at various Trump properties. So at this point, he feels completely uninhibited and unbridled for the crypto scam and now just to openly take a $400 million jet plane gift from Qatar. But of course, it’s an absolute defiance of the meaning of our Constitution.
Raskin: Yeah. His argument is simply not credible with respect either to the facts or to the law. First of all, we have Air Force One. We have an airplane that’s working perfectly fine. And it’s Donald Trump who has been the one whining about it and demanding a new one. So that’s why his friends in Qatar decided to give it to him. So it completely defies credulity to argue that this is somehow an imperative for the U.S. government. In any event, if that were to be the case, then we should cancel the order on the other one because we clearly don’t need two Air Force Ones. Or if they were going to lend it to us the way that the U.S. lent the aircraft to the United Kingdom during World War II—well, in that case, at the end of it, either we would return it to them or we would be able to sell it. And then if it’s a real gift, the money can go to pay off the debt. But instead, it’s going to Donald Trump’s personal library. And of course, federal government money can’t be used for that because that’s all privately raised.
Sargent: Well, he says that he’s not going to use it after his presidency, but I assume that if Democrats were to take charge of everything after this presidency is over—presuming it does end at some point—then Democrats would aggressively recoup whatever emoluments Trump is making off with.
Abraham Lincoln came to Congress in the middle of the Civil War. He got this beautiful elephant tusk from the king of Siam, and he wanted to keep it. He sent it over to Congress and he said could he have it, and they said, Abe, you’re doing a great job. We love all your work on the Civil War, but no, you can’t keep it. Turn that over to the Department of the Interior or State. I can’t remember which one they sent it to.
Raskin: That’s the point. The framers predicted just situations like this. They didn’t want us debating, Is it in our national security interest? Is it consistent with public integrity? Is it safe and so on? They said, Let Congress debate that. Let Congress decide it so it doesn’t engulf the whole country. And the Supreme Court found in the last term when we started going through all this stuff with the Trump hotels and the golf courses and everything, they said, Nobody’s got standing to raise it. Congress has to deal with it, so Congress must deal with it.
Raskin: Well, what we’ve got is like the Trump hotel on steroids in this term. Because they were collecting tens of millions through the hotels and the various golf courses. That just looks like a mom-and-pop operation today. With Trump’s embrace of crypto—and his presidential memecoin—that opens up this cavernous gateway for foreign governments to be funneling money directly in to Donald Trump. As he manipulates the stock market with his various Trump tariff schemes—and he knows when the market’s going to go up and when it’s going to go down—a word to the wise in these foreign governments can make them tens of billions of dollars. And then they can funnel money back to him through the crypto mechanism. We’re talking about corruption at just an epic scale right now.
Raskin: Well, we’re not in session. We’ll be back in session tomorrow, so I hope I’ll get the chance to interact with them. I’ve definitely sent some messages out. It’s been tough historically on the emoluments questions to get them to take a stand. But again, we’re talking about levels of corruption that are just larger than life and that the whole world can see. And the reason why we should stick to the wisdom of the founders is that you just say categorically, You can’t accept this unless you go to Congress, and then they have to make their case to Congress. They don’t make a case in the court of public opinion and online on why it’s such a good idea—they can explain it to Congress, and then we can decide.
Sargent: Can I ask you, Congressman, what will you ask House Republicans to join you in doing?
Then I would hope that we could work together on a bipartisan basis to actually institute a legislative machinery to deal with this, so that there is a requirement that a president who’s collecting—or proposing to collect—emoluments has a system for coming to Congress, asking for it, we will get back to him [by] a date certain. And if we approve it, he can go forward. And if not, he can’t. And if he does go forward nonetheless, then we have civil and potentially criminal sanctions for violating this central constitutional command, which tries to establish a wall of separation between the formal workings of the government and the private finances of the president.
Raskin: Yeah, we need the Congress of the U.S. simply taking a stand to tell the president, It has come to our attention that you’re proposing to accept a $400 million present from the government of Qatar. Without prejudicing whether we would accept it or reject it, it must come to Congress, so go ahead and submit your request to us.
Raskin: Well, remember, we’ve got extremely slender margins. It would just take a handful of Republicans coming over to our side to make the formal demand in a resolution that the president have to come to Congress. So I’m hopeful that if we turn up the heat on this—because it really goes to the public integrity of the entire federal government—that we’ll get enough Republicans joining us. We’re looking for less than 5 percent of the Republicans who’d be willing to join us.
Raskin: Yes.
Raskin: That’s what we’re going to be working on this week. Yeah. And I’m hopeful that we can get some Republican support with us.
Raskin: Yeah, look, our perspective on it is this is Congress’s prerogative. The way that the Constitution is written is nobody can take a present or an emolument without coming to Congress first, so her opinion is essentially irrelevant. If for some reason she can explain why the plain language of the Constitution doesn’t mean what it means, fine. But it sounds like she’s got a conflict of interest of her own. And so we can’t even get to deal with the president’s structural constitutional conflict of interest if we’re hung up on her personal conflict of interest in terms of what she’s done for Qatar. They’ve tied themselves up in knots over there. We got to get back to the basic clarity of the constitutional command.
Raskin: Exactly. And that’s what we’ve been trying to do all along. We had a hearing in House Judiciary last week about the budget reconciliation bill, and we just started putting out amendments saying nobody should be deported from the country without due process. The Republicans refused to speak against it, but they all voted against it. We put one out that said that ICE should not be deporting U.S. citizens. They didn’t speak against it, but they voted against it. And so these clear categorical commands that are rooted in the Constitution cannot get their support, but at least there will be a record there for the American people to make a judgment on next year when we get into congressional elections.
Raskin: I’m working on now, but basically it’s a simply a demand to the president to seek the consent of Congress if he intends to keep a $400 million present from a foreign king, prince, or state.
Raskin: No, I think everybody gets it and everybody understands that the corruption lies at the heart of this authoritarian assault on our institutions. The Trump family has made more than $1 billion a month since the new administration began. The crypto is now a majority of what they’re doing. I think the jet plane is a very concrete and vivid demonstration of what’s going on. And when people get that, then we will be able to explain the more complicated arrangement of how they’re using crypto also to funnel money from you name it—foreign states and governments and royals and potentially criminal organizations, people who are supplicants, people who seeking different kinds of favor from the administration—right through to the president’s pockets. And that’s how this crypto scam is working.
Raskin: Either the government is going to be an instrument for the common good of everybody and it will control the rapaciousness of the people at the top—or alternatively it’s going to be an instrument for the wealthiest and most powerful people, like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and they will plunder the rest of society and they will ruin the achievements of American democracy like Medicaid and Social Security. So I think people will understand that. Is this going to be a government for the few or a government for the many?
Raskin: I’m with you in the sense that we need to be identifying lawbreaking as it happens—both ordinary statutory crimes and high crimes and misdemeanors. We need to be specifying what’s going on so people understand the implications of that. And that’s just important for the rule of law. Obviously, Donald Trump is somebody who is perfectly willing to use the pardon power to pardon people who break the law for him. We saw that with the January 6 rioters and insurrectionists. Nonetheless, we have to uphold the rule of law so people understand what’s taking place.
Raskin: Sure. I don’t see why not. We can absolutely say it. It goes without saying, of course, you know, I don’t think we want to invite a back-and-forth with Trump about how he’ll pardon anybody who the Democrats dare to hold to account under the rule of law. But look, it’s very important for the country to know what the actual rules are, and that’s why this emoluments thing is so critical. No other president has gone anywhere near doing something like this. It’s an outrageous abuse of the law, and Donald Trump will push everything as far as he can go. That’s why we say to our Republican friends, You’ve got to draw the line here. We need to establish boundaries on his behavior. He will literally go as far as you allow him to go, and it’s very important for us to cut it off here. And then we also need to have serious legislative dialogue and make some progress on crypto and the use of crypto to circumvent all of the campaign finance laws and bribery laws of the country.
Raskin: We need to have rules in place that require the president to report within a short period of time the receipt, or proposed receipt, of an emolument—seventy-two hours or a week, something like that. And then we will have also a shortened time period for convening under the proper committee to determine whether or not that should be allowed, and then we should bring it to the floor. We need a real mechanism for doing this. It can’t just be the Wild West when it comes to foreign government emoluments. That’s just a trashing of our basic constitutional values.
Raskin: In the last Congress, I did that, yes, with a group of senators. And we’ll do the same thing. We will absolutely fight for a legislative mechanism to strengthen and enforce the meaning of the emoluments clause.
Raskin: Yes, there are many indications in the conversations of the founders that violations of the emoluments clause were impeachable. It seems to me the cardinal principle of our constitutional system that you can’t use public office for the purposes of private moneymaking. And it’s especially dangerous when what you’re doing is engaging in moneymaking activities with foreign states.
Raskin: Delighted to be with you, Greg. Hang tough!
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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