NEW YORK – The Trump family business released a voluntary ethics agreement Friday that allows it to strike deals with private foreign companies, a move that could help outside actors try to buy influence with the new administration.
The so-called ethics white paper bars the Trump Organization from striking deals directly with foreign governments, but allows ones with private companies abroad, a significant departure from President-elect Donald Trump's first term. An ethics pact that Trump signed eight years ago barred both foreign government and foreign company deals.
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The Trump company also announced it would commit to several safeguards from his first term designed to stop his private financial interests from shaping policy. That includes hiring an outside ethics adviser to vet deals.
"The Trump Organization is dedicated to not just meeting but vastly exceeding its legal and ethical obligations during my father’s Presidency,” said executive vice president Eric Trump.
The Trump Organization recently struck deals for hotels and golf resorts in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, raising concerns by government ethics experts that president-elect Trump's personal financial interests could influence policy toward those countries.
The family company has expressed interest in striking deals in Israel and elsewhere, and has financial interests in two businesses with publicly traded stock that could get a boost from foreign investors. That includes Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of social media platform Truth Social, and a new cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial.
“The scale of corruption will be orders of magnitude greater than what we saw in the first Trump administration," said government ethics lawyer Kathleen Clark of Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. People trying to win Trump's favor now have an easy way to do so, she said, by using “massive influxes of cash through ‘investments’ in Trump crypto and real estate ventures.”
The Trump Organization announced that it was hiring William A. Burck, a managing partner of Quinn Emanuel LLP, to vet deals that could pose conflicts with public policy.
As in the last ethics agreement, the five-page white paper also prohibits Trump from “day-to-day” decision making at the Trump Organization, limits financial information about the business shared with him and commits the company to donate to the U.S. Treasury profits from foreign government spending at its properties.
Under U.S. law, federal government officials are not permitted to hold financial interests in businesses that could sway their opinion on public policy they help shape, and are often forced to sell off their stakes. U.S. presidents are excluded from the post-Watergate ethics ban, but all presidents have voluntarily agreed to follow the law, except for Trump.
The first billionaire president would have had to sell more than a dozen golf courses around the world, office and residential towers in Las Vegas, Chicago and New York and several resorts, including Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
In his first term, Trump pledged to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest at the outset of his presidency, but ended up openly courting business to his properties instead. He once tried to hold a G-7 meeting of global leaders at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. He had to abandon the idea after outcry from critics.
His Trump hotel in Washington D.C. was also a major source of concern for ethics watchdogs in his first term. The Trump International Hotel down the street from the White House quickly became a gathering spot for lobbyists, both domestic and foreign, as well as foreign diplomats.
Several groups accused Trump of violating the Constitution's “emoluments” ban on gifts and payment to the president, citing the hotel in particular. The hotel has since been sold and the Supreme Court refused to rule on an emoluments violation after Trump had left office, citing that the issue was moot.
Now, the emoluments clause could become a legal headache for Trump again given his company's sprawling businesses, including the two new, publicly traded ventures.
His financial stake in one of them, Trump Media, is worth billions of dollars.
Critics worry people who want to curry favor with the president, including foreign officials, could buy stock in the company, pushing the price up further along with his paper wealth.
Another new Trump family venture, World Liberty Financial, a platform used to trade cryptocurrencies, is also controversial.
In his first term in office, Trump said he was “not a fan” of cryptocurrency and tweeted in 2019, “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”
He has since reversed that position, promising to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet” at a bitcoin conference in Nashville this year. He has tapped two cryptocurrency champions to join his administration, Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary nominee, Scott Bessent.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has warned that cryptocurrencies are volatile investments with few safeguards to protect investors from manipulation and fraud, and cracked down on some firms. It's not clear if the agency's close scrutiny of the industry will continue in the new administration. Trump’s nominee to head the SEC, Paul Atkins, is an advocate for cryptocurrencies.
Eric Trump, the son most heavily involved in running the Trump Organization, has expressed frustration that the company had become a lightning rod for conflicts of interest critics during his father's first presidential term despite the company's voluntary ethics ban on certain deals. He has said he wants a freer hand this time running the business.
In a Vietnam deal in October, the Trump Organization joined with a Vietnamese developer with ties to the ruling Communist Party for a $1.5 billion luxury golf resort, raising questions about whether this might influence U.S. policy.
The deal comes at an especially vulnerable time for Vietnam as Trump vows to raise tariffs on many countries. Vietnam has a large U.S. trade surplus that makes it a ripe target for Trump's threat to punish countries he says are engaging in unfair trading practices.
The Trump Organization also has buildings bearing the Trump name in India, Turkey and several other countries. It owns two golf courses in Scotland, and one in Ireland, and has plans for resorts in other countries, including Oman and Indonesia that are at various stages of development.