House Democrats have released evidence showing that Donald Trump leveraged his
role as president of the United States to collect millions of dollars
from foreign entities.
In other words, Democrats are now accusing Donald Trump of carrying
out the very act that House Republicans want to impeach Joe Biden for,
with absolutely no evidence at all.
I'm annoyed by both sides on this at this point.
Okay, I'm annoyed by Republicans going after Biden with an impeachment inquiry,
even though there's no evidence indicating that he benefited from Hunter
Biden's foreign business dealings.
And I'm also annoyed by Democrats digging this crap up when we've known about this
for a long time, and they did nothing about it until suddenly
they're putting it out in the media.
So let's get to the details.
So these details are laid out in a 156 page document, a report, if you will,
titled white House for sale and was produced by Democrats specifically
in the House Oversight Committee.
That's the same committee that consists of the Republicans
trying to impeach Joe Biden over nothing.
Now, they released this information as a counterweight to Republicans
and their efforts to impeach Biden.
So it's all political. Let's just keep it real.
Trump's businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during
his presidency, according to new documents released by House Democrats on Thursday
that show how much he received from overseas transactions while he was
in the white House, most of it from China.
Now, the Constitution prohibits the president from accepting money payments or
gifts of any kind from foreign governments and monarchs unless he obtains the consent
and permission of Congress to do so.
And obviously, he didn't do that.
And I want to give you a little more context, because what this is really about
is when Trump was president, he would conduct official
white House business in his hotels.
He would probably insist that they took place in his hotels.
So you have, you know, people from other countries, you know, foreign officials
coming to the United States to meet with Donald Trump or meet with members
of his administration in his properties, and as a result, his properties
would benefit financially from that.
Okay.
So that's what they're essentially referring to here.
Now, China made the largest total payment, $5.5 million to his business interests,
the report found.
Those payments included millions of dollars from China's embassy
in the United States, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China
and the Hainan Airlines holding Company.
But that wasn't the only country involved. You also have Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia was the second largest spender, shelling out more than $615,000
at the Trump World Tower and Trump International Hotel.
And at a campaign rally in 2015, Trump told on himself a little bit.
He suggested that his personal financial incentives might influence his dealings
with another government.
He said, quote, Saudi Arabia and I get along great with all of them.
The report quotes him saying they buy apartments from me.
They spend $40 million, 50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them?
I like them very much.
- So. Yeah. - I mean, why is this news now?
That's what I want to know. This was news literally years ago.
Literally years ago.
The New York Times, which is reporting this latest story, had done their
own investigation to find how much money was spent by foreign governments
in his properties as he was conducting official white House business.
Yeah, well, I can answer that question.
And but I'm actually mixed on this story as I it sounds like you are,
so first of all, the reason it's coming up now is because the Republicans are doing
a nonsense hearings on Joe Biden.
They have no evidence that he had any business
that took any advantage of his positions.
So Jamie Raskin put together this report saying, yeah, okay.
You want to look at, presidents and how they took advantage of, you know, their
office to make money from foreigners.
Well, here's $7.8 million that Donald Trump made.
That's the fairest thing in the world.
I thought they should have done it immediately.
And if I was the Democrats, I would have done this and ten times more,
and I would have done it in the minute that the hearings began,
I would have fired back 100 times about how Trump made money off of this and that.
Okay, now.
But so that's why it's happening. There's a lot of truth to that.
But our job is to be objective analyst here.
So now let me give you the other side of the coin.
So a lot of the money came from a Chinese bank that signed a deal with
Trump Towers back in 2008, well before the Donald Trump ever ran for office.
So that is a hugely mitigating factor.
What were they supposed to do, cancel their, lease agreement with Trump
once he became president?
Maybe. Right.
And so I'll get to what Trump should have done in a second,
because there is, there, there.
And then $650,000 from Saudi Arabia is the least amount of money Saudi Arabia
has ever spent on anything they sent spent more on bubblegum yesterday.
Okay, now, having said that, it's pretty tough to rack up to $650,000 worth
of bills in a in just by going to a hotel.
But if anybody could do it, the Saudis could.
So but now why is Trump wrong?
Well, there's a very clear, clause in the Constitution, although apparently
nobody ever reads the Constitution, where it says if you get money from
a foreign government or any kind of gift.
And and by the way, the Republicans also say, look, there was goods exchanged here.
Unlike Biden, they claim, he's just they're profiting off the name,
although they have no evidence of that for Joe Biden at all.
For Donald Trump, they say, well, this they paid for a hotel.
They got a hotel room, they paid for a rent, they got rent.
But, guys, you know how you could shuffle a lot of money
through there through rent, etc.?
In fact, Donald Trump did that most with his own contributors, the minute
that he started getting donations into his political campaign and he didn't have to
pay for his own bills all the way back in 2015 2016, he started massively increasing
the rent that he was charging his campaign, so that the campaign donations
from the average American average MAGA guy would go directly into his pocket.
So he's he's not short on scams, right.
So do we follow the Constitution or don't we?
The problem with Donald Trump is that he violates so many laws
and so many provisions of the Constitution that you just can't keep up.
It's a flood.
If any other president had made nearly $8 million from foreign governments,
into their properties, no matter how legitimately they did it,
it would be a firestorm.
But this is, you know, number 187 on his list of transgressions.
So it feels minor in comparison to his much larger crimes.
So you're right in that it feels minor when you put it in the context
of everything else that he's done, but it's also something that feels minor
in the context of our current disgustingly corrupt government.
When you literally have members of Congress engaging in insider trading with
impunity, something that we would go to prison for, it really does like it almost
forces a black pill down your throat.
Okay.
When you have a sitting member of the Senate who makes decision about decisions
about energy related policy, heavily personally invested
in his own private business pertaining to coal, a business that he makes
half $1 million off of every year.
And yes, I'm talking about Senator Joe Manchin.
It's just hard for me to take anything Democrats have to say seriously.
Yeah, I know, but look, just they're all corrupt.
Jake.
I Anna, I agree with you. But so they they're all.
Looking they're all looking to like, find a nut, bury their nut
and move on with their lives.
I hear you on that.
Nevertheless, we have to call things out as they are, right?
And so, there's campaign contributions, which are massive,
cancer in our body politic.
Both Democrats and Republicans are deeply corrupt because of that.
Never talked about in mainstream media.
You've heard us cover that thousands of times.
It applies to both parties, Republicans a smidge more, but Democrats
massively guilty of it as well.
But one of our members and come do the show with us.
Com slash join.
We read your comments oftentimes in the middle of stories to just Jim wrote
in about hey, wait a minute guys.
Don't be hypocritical because you asked the Democrats to fight back all the time.
Here they are fighting back.
And I have to say, I totally agree with just Jim because.
So this is what did we want him, what did wanted them to do
or wanted Jamie Raskin to do?
Well, I would have said this.
I mean, this is a good way of fighting back.
And to Anna, in this particular case, if the Republicans were not making a big
deal out of absolutely nothing regarding Joe Biden, if they weren't lying,
as they always do, they lie 99 out of 100 times and pretending that Joe Biden
had something to do with Hunter Biden's deals right then I would say, okay, yeah,
this is Trump's 187th crime.
It's relatively minor compared to his other 186 crimes.
We you know, we don't have to make a federal case out of it, literally,
even though it's in clear, brazen violation of the Constitution.
And by the way, let me just say that real quick.
Let me explain that according to the Constitution,
if you take any kind of gift, you have to ask Congress whether you're allowed to.
- Any. - Any payment at all.
So Lincoln had to give back like an elephant tusk that he received as a gift
because Congress wouldn't approve it.
So Trump brazenly says, Constitution, I don't care at all.
I'm not going to report it. I'm just going to take the money.
Hey, look, Anna, if I was Raskin or the other Democrats,
I would have done this earlier. I would have done it more viciously.
I would have done it even, you know, ten times harder and said that every time
you mention your nonsense about Joe Biden, I'm going to bash you over the head
with what a crook Donald Trump is.
And by the way, these are all peanuts compared to the $2 billion
the Saudis gave Jared Kushner right after the election was over.
That's a son in law.
So it's a thousand, literally a thousand times worse
than anything Hunter Biden's ever done.
So if the Republicans said, yes, we agree, you guys are right.
Trump and his family are dirty, dirty crooks who try to steal money
at every turn and put it in their pockets.
Then I say, okay, fair enough, then we can move on.
But have they ever said that? No, they're goddamn liars.
Pretending Trump's a saint and that Joe Biden did this crooked.
How many shows do you see that take on Joe Biden?
More than we do.
But we're honest and we tell you, no, he didn't do this thing.
So I'm tired of the Republican lies.
And overall, I'm super glad they're asking us.
Fighting back.
Yeah, I'm tired of the lies and the corruption on both sides of the aisle.
And when you say, you know, oh, we should we should give Democrats a round of
applause, they're finally fighting back.
You want to know what they want done with this report,
what their end goal is with this report.
Get a load of this.
They want they're urging Congress to consider adopting new disclosure rules
to help the legislative branch obtain information for proper oversight.
That's what they want. Changed.
Who put this report together again? Jank.
Who put this report together?
It was members of Congress. Right.
So Congress is writing a letter to itself to declare that Congress needs
to pass new laws pertaining to disclosure.
No, no, there's a good reason for that.
So in this particular case, Trump's accounting firm, was blocking all
investigations into his financing after they were also charged with illegality
because of the nonstop fraud that Donald Trump did and and the fact
that they might have been implicated.
They then finally started working with Congress near the,
the end of the last terme.
Right.
And when the Republicans came in, they said, don't cooperate with Congress.
Whatever you do, do not tell us what the fraud that Donald Trump has done.
We don't want to know. We want to investigate fraud.
That didn't happen with Joe Biden.
And we want to make sure you stop investigating the fraud
that did happen with Donald Trump.
So that's why they're asking for, hey, can we actually go back
to investigating in a fair and honest way?
And with Republicans, the answer is always no.
- They hate being honest or fair. - Okay.
Mazars released those financial documents in 2022.
It has taken the Democrats this long to put their report out because it's
not politically motivated at all.
I know, but remember, like I said, they stopped sharing because as soon as the
Republicans came in, comer and the others told him, don't you dare help us show
any of the crimes that Donald Trump did.
- And they listened. - Yeah.
Mansour stopped cooperating because Congress officially stopped asking
them for the for the accounting.
Okay. All right.
Well, there it is.
You guys know about another bad thing that Trump did.
So I don't know what's going to end up happening with this.
But what did stand out to me and I thought it was interesting,
was Eric Trump's need to get a little defensive about this report.
And so during a recent interview about the report, he tried to defend his family
and the fact that, you know, there is evidence that Trump properties
took money from foreign governments.
Let's take a look.
If somebody came into one of our hotels when my father was president and they
were from a foreign country, a government official from a foreign country, and we
found out about it, you know what we do?
We donate all the money for that.
You know, that margarita that they bought at the bar donated back.
To the United States Treasury.
I don't know if there's any evidence of that, and I'm going to speculate
and say it's not true.
So that was an interview from August of 2023.
He said something very similar again today to The New York Times.
Let's go to graphic six.
The narrative is insane, Eric Trump said of the Democrats report.
He added that there is no president of the United States history who was
tougher on China than Donald Trump, citing the substantial tariffs
the former president imposed on the country's goods and services.
That is true.
He also said the Trump Organization did not have the ability or viability
to stop someone from booking through third parties at the hotel.
Let's go to graphic five now.
Eric Trump also noted in an email that the Chinese bank mentioned
in the report had signed a 20 year lease at Trump Tower in 2008,
which is what Jake had alluded to earlier.
And he argued it was clear that the former president had not allowed
his personal business incentives to drive his official actions.
And he did note to the New York Times he repeated the claim that he made on,
you know, I think that was, on right wing media about how they would donate
the money to the Treasury Department.
I don't even know. I think that that's not true.
I'm not sure I'm going to be clear about that.
But if it's proven to be false and a complete lie, why?
Why the need to say that? Like it's.
Just.
No, look, if it's true, it is actually a little bit of, you know, an excuse for
the Trump people, but they still should follow the law and they should follow the
Constitution, and they definitely didn't.
But the reason I didn't state it in, in my list of things that mitigate
this story was because Eric Trump said it.
Eric Trump and every member of the Trump family has a record of lying
approximately 95% of the time that they say anything at all.
If they tell you they want something for lunch, they're probably lying
and they want something else.
So I would I'm only going to believe it if it could ever be proven,
which there's never been any proof.
I've never heard of that before in my whole life.
No Republican has ever said, oh, they're taking the money from the hotels
and donating it to charity.
So there's the first time we're ever hearing about it,
even though Donald Trump has been this wonderfully charitable guy the whole time.
- Yeah, please. - Donald Trump wouldn't pay his own taxes.
It's like the idea that he's going to take some of the profits from his properties
and then funnel it over to the Treasury Department, just to make sure
that everything he's doing is above board.
He's not violating any rules or constitutional, or anything
in the Constitution to me is laughable.
But again, just want to repeat, we haven't been able to verify that as a lie, so.
Or as something that's truthful.
I think the New York Times maybe should have looked into it.
- They have the resources to do that. - Yeah.
We have to put an asterisk every time with Trump people.
We rebuttable presumption is that they're lying, but it could be disproved.
All right.
Last word goes to one of our members and other member, Naughtius Maximus wrote in.
Maybe Dems need to seize Jared Kushner's laptop and mention it a billion times.
I couldn't agree more.
I'd seize it instantly, and I'd say, you got $2 billion
right after you were in charge of foreign policy towards Saudi Arabia.
The minute you get out of office, you get $2 billion.
I want your laptop, I want your desktop. I want a warrant for your house.
I want $2 billion.
We're talking about Hunter Biden's laptop and his artwork and his
the Mickey Mouse scams that he ran.
I mean, be a professional scammer like Jared Kushner.
Great point by our members.
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