With Congress Pliant, an Emboldened Trump Pushes His Business Interests

Norms recognized for decades in Washington by both parties no longer appear to apply to the Trump White House, former prosecutors and ethics lawyers say.

By Eric Lipton and Maggie Haberman, archive.is

The Oval Office meeting convened by President Trump brought together the most important leaders in the world of professional golf: Jay Monahan, the top executive at the PGA Tour, and, via telephone, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of the Saudi Arabia-backed league known as LIV Golf.

The stated goal was to figure out a way to eliminate roadblocks preventing the planned merger between the rival two groups.

But the gathering earlier this month said something even more important about the Trump administration itself. Mr. Trump was not simply using the power of his office to forge an agreement — something that presidents have done for centuries. In this case, Mr. Trump was pushing a merger that relates to his own family’s financial interest.

The Trump family is a LIV Golf business partner. The family has repeatedly hosted LIV tournaments at its golf venues, including one planned in April at the Trump National Doral in Miami for the fourth year in a row.

In other words, according to half a dozen former Justice Department prosecutors and government ethics lawyers, Mr. Trump’s participation in this discussion was a brazen conflict of interest — one of a series that have played out over the past few weeks, with a frequency unlike any presidency in modern times, even in the first Trump term.

Mr. Trump has re-entered the White House with a massively expanded portfolio of business interests, some of which require government approval or regulation, others of which are publicly traded, and still others involving foreign deals.

Presidents are not subject to the conflict of interest laws that regulate the rest of the government, but the recent actions underscore how emboldened Mr. Trump feels in his second term. It demonstrates his confidence that the lines dividing various Trump interests, and his desire to reward friends and punish perceived enemies, won’t trigger congressional oversight in a political ecosystem that he helped change.

“None of this is very surprising unfortunately,” said Hui Chen, a former federal prosecutor and corporate lawyer who later became a Justice Department adviser on fraud cases. “The entire force and power of the United States government is now part of the business support structure for the Trump family.”

Even some local matters that involve the president’s businesses require government approval. A crisis that unfolded at the Justice Department in the past week over an action in New York has fueled concerns about the department’s independence and Mr. Trump’s myriad conflicts in issues involving the city.

Last week, the Trump Justice Department directed federal prosecutors in Manhattan to dismiss charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. Mr. Trump has said he did not ask for the dismissal, but Mr. Adams oversees a vast bureaucracy in the city where Mr. Trump’s private company has a number of properties, and the mayor has made a concerted effort to forge a relationship with the president.

‘He Will Not Allow Conflicts’

Mr. Trump in comments, social media posts and interviews, has rejected any suggestions that he is violating ethics standards and has accused those criticizing his actions as political partisans. Mr. Trump and his advisers have described the country as being in a state of existential decline as the president begins his second term.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he wrote Saturday on his social media site.

That assertion — an apparent repurposing of a quote of unknown sourcing but attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte — is expressly counter to the founding fathers’ vision of a government based on checks and balances among executive, legislative and judicial branches, in which no one branch holds too much power.

The democratic system in United States never really anticipated what is happening in the Trump administration, said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department national security lawyer who is now a law professor at the University of Minnesota.

“The presidency requires virtue — it requires a basic level of decency and loyalty to the country,” Mr. Rozenshtein said. “If you don’t have that kind of person, there is not much one can do unfortunately at that point, especially if Congress is supine.”

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Mr. Trump’s allies point to ethical quagmires that President Bill Clinton and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. faced during their time in office, including Mr. Biden’s son Hunter’s convictions and eventual pardon by his father.

Still, Mr. Trump’s business ventures have created a climate for potential conflicts unlike any other U.S. president. And the list of matters sparking controversy in the second Trump administration is extensive.

Not long before Mr. Trump took office, his family started to sell its own cryptocurrency token — earning along with its partners an estimated $100 million in transaction fees — just as Mr. Trump was preparing to sign an executive order directing his administration to draft new cryptocurrency regulations easing oversight of the industry.

Mr. Trump has separately tasked Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to oversee a structure approving specific hires for agencies, even though some of those are investigating Mr. Musk’s companies or cumulatively paying them billions of dollars a year.

In Washington, Mr. Trump appointed the lawyer Edward R. Martin Jr. to serve as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Mr. Martin resigned from representing a criminal defendant before moving in his capacity as a federal prosecutor to dismiss the charges filed against his client.

Ethics complaints that have been filed against Mr. Martin claimed he violated professional code of conduct rules for lawyers. Mr. Trump announced on Monday that he will nominate Mr. Martin to take the post permanently, saying he had a long history of public service — “always with the same goal, of serving his community, and creating a brighter future for all.”

In a statement, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said: “President Trump is the chief executive of the executive branch and reserves the right to fire anyone he wants.” Of concerns about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest, she said that Mr. Trump “has stated he will not allow conflicts, and Elon himself has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts.” She did not address questions about deals connected to the Trump family.

Nonetheless, each of these actions violates traditional norms of ethics in government, according to these former prosecutors and ethics lawyers.

Dismantled Safeguards

What makes the situation most worrisome, these lawyers said, is that so much of the system erected since the Watergate era to monitor and punish individuals involved in ethics violations has rapidly been dismantled since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

“They are taking a wrecking ball to organizations across the executive branch that play a role in integrity, oversight and accountability,” said David Huitema, who was confirmed by the Senate as the new head of Office of Government Ethics in November for a five-year term, but then fired by Mr. Trump this month.

Mr. Trump not only fired nearly 20 inspectors general who investigate waste, fraud and abuse, he also fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, who examines public corruption, and the head of the Office of Government Ethics, which provides guidance to agencies across the government on what is right and wrong. (Mr. Trump has asked the Supreme Court to confirm his ability to dismiss the Office of Special Counsel director, Hampton Dellinger.)

At the Justice Department, which can take up criminal violations of ethics laws even without referrals from separate federal agencies, Mr. Trump has appointed members of his former criminal defense team to top posts, including Emil J. Bove III, the acting U.S. deputy attorney general who helped defend Mr. Trump against charges in New York that he falsified business records.

The Supreme Court ruling last July — concluding that as president Mr. Trump has “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts” — only heightened his sense of impunity.

A Key Exemption

Despite the exemption from the criminal conflict of interest law that prohibits federal employees from taking any action that directly affects their family financial holdings, presidents have generally sought to honor it as the standard, said Richard Painter, who served as a White House ethics adviser during George W. Bush’s tenure.

One of the clearest conflicts of interest was Mr. Trump’s Oval Office meeting on professional golf, the ethics lawyers said.

Federal employees are allowed to participate in decisions or meetings that might impact their own family finances if it is a general policy, such as the income tax rate that millions of Americans pay.

But if it is a “particular matter” involving specific parties that relate to a business deal their family is directly involved in, it is a criminal offense for federal employees to participate in these deliberations, especially when the outcome might bring financial benefits.

Mr. Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of LIV Golf, is also the governor of Saudi Arabia’s $925 billion sovereign wealth fund, which has bankrolled LIV Golf, as well as the private equity fund set up by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Mr. Al-Rumayyan visited with Mr. Trump in 2022 at the Trump family’s Bedminster golf club during one of the first LIV tournaments there and the two have stayed in touch since, including joining Mr. Trump in November at an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight at Madison Square Garden.

The Trump family, for years now, has wanted to host more professional golf tournaments at its 15 courses in the United States, Europe and the Middle East — an effort that suffered a setback in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, when PGA of America canceled a planned tournament at Bedminster.

Mr. Adams, the New York mayor, also has a link to the family’s golf efforts and Saudi Arabia.

It was Mr. Adams who resisted pressure from the New York City Council in 2022 to cancel a Saudi-backed Aramco Team Series at Ferry Point, a city-owned golf course then leased to the Trump family, said Eric Trump, the president’s middle son who runs the Trump organization.

Mr. Adams’s relationship with the Trumps continued to grow, and he along with a top adviser joined Eric Trump and Mr. Trump for a meeting in Florida during the presidential transition.

Eric Trump told a radio host this month, that he did not know much about the criminal case against Mr. Adams, but that what he did know he saw as thin. He added that Mr. Adams was “always supportive” and had not tried to hinder the Trump family business in New York City, as he said Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio, had repeatedly.

When Mr. Bove, in the Justice Department, moved to dismiss the charges against Mr. Adams he said it was done, in part, to allow the mayor to do his job effectively, including helping with the president’s desired migrant crackdown.

In recent days, multiple lawyers at the Justice Department’s public integrity division, which prosecutes public corruption cases, have resigned, after refusing to play a role in the dismissal of the charges.

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