"Trump's Scandals: A List"
David Leonhardt, The New York Times
Updated Feb. 1, 2018
The list of Trump scandals keeps growing.
“Amid the chaos and dysfunction,” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie writes, “it can be easy to miss that this White House is corrupt. Remarkably, unbelievably, corrupt.” Given the number of potential scandals involving personal enrichment — of President Trump, his family or top administration officials — I wanted to create a list of all the major ones. Here goes:
• The presidency is benefiting Trump’s business in numerous ways. Government officials have stayed in hotels that bear Trump’s name, for example, while some foreign government officials have taken steps to curry favor by better accommodating Trump-branded properties in their countries.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club doubled its membership rates after he won the White House. Trump’s companies sold more than $35 million in real estate last year, according to one report. Many of the sales went to opaque shell companies, which hide the buyers’ identities, and flow into a trust the president may access. Trump International Realty, run by Eric and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s sons, is seeking new business in South Florida.
Also: Eric Trump has been giving his father quarterly updates on the financial health of his businesses, despite promises that the president would have no involvement. Those businesses have also done deals with foreign governments, despite the president’s pledge that they wouldn’t.
• Trump has spent more than $30 million of taxpayer money traveling to properties he owns, by one estimate.
• Ryan Zinke, Trump’s secretary of the interior, is under investigationfor chartering a $12,000 flight from Las Vegas to Montana at taxpayers’ expense. Zinke also failed to disclose an investment in a Montana gun company, booked a $12,000 flight on an oil executive’s plane, spent almost $40,000 of a wildfire preparedness fund to pay for flights and paid $6,000 for a helicopter trip to visit Vice President Mike Pence.
• David Shulkin, the secretary of Veterans Affairs, charged taxpayers for a trip to Europe that included stopovers at Wimbledon and Westminster Abbey, plus a river cruise for him and his wife.
• Scott Pruitt, who runs the Environmental Protection Agency, regularly dines with donors and lobbyists from industries his department is regulating. He also used public money to pay for a soundproof booth in his office and chartered private and military overseas flights.
• Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, tried to use a government plane to fly him to Europe for his honeymoon. He may also have availed himself of a taxpayer-funded military plane to view the solar eclipse in August, though he says the trip had a different purpose.
The Treasury Department’s inspector general concluded in October that Mnuchin broke no laws when he spent $800,000 to travel on military planes. But the inspector general also criticized Mnuchin’s insufficient explanation for why he needed to spend so much taxpayer money. “What is of concern is a disconnect between the standard of proof called for,” the inspector general wrote, “and the actual amount of proof provided by Treasury and accepted by the White House in justifying these trip requests.”
• Tom Price, the former secretary of health and human services who resigned in September, spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private planes. Trump hired Price despite Price’s history of using his position in Congress to receive sweetheart stock deals.
• Despite Trump’s spending only eight days in Trump Tower as president so far, the government has spent $130,000 per month since April to lease space in the building for a military office that supports the White House.
•Despite counterintelligence warnings that Chinese officials might be trying to curry favor with him to advance China’s interests, Jared Kushner has reportedly used his closeness with Trump to secure foreign investment in Kushner's family owned businesses in exchange for granting visas.
• A Chinese government office approved trademarks for a company owned by Ivanka Trump on the same day that China’s president met with President Trump.
• Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, may have used his position to curry favor with a Russian oligarch as part of a long-running money-laundering and tax-evasion scheme, according to charges brought against him by Robert Mueller, the special counsel.
• Michael Flynn lobbied on behalf of the Turkish government, but Trump selected him as national security adviser anyway (before later ousting him).
• Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump adviser, promoted Ivanka’s fashion line on television.
• As The New Yorker, ProPublica and the public radio station WNYC reported, longtime Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz donated or solicited more than $50,000 on behalf of a Manhattan district attorney who later dropped a case against Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
• Ivanka Trump, a White House adviser to her father, owns a stake in a Trump-branded luxury hotel in Washington valued at between $5 million and $25 million.
• K.T. McFarland, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, may have violated federal law by using over $13,000 in campaign funds to boost her work as a media figure.
• Rebeckah Adcock, a top Department of Agriculture deregulation official, met with pesticide lobbyists from her former employer and discussed issues related to her previous lobbying.
• A charity led by Eric Trump paid over $145,000 to properties owned by his father during the election. Despite pledging not to raise money for the organization after his resignation in December 2016, Eric has continued to attend fundraisers held at Trump properties.
• Brenda Fitzgerald, Trump’s former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, purchased shares in food, drug and tobacco companies after taking charge of an agency that aims to reduce smoking. She resigned in January.
• Despite warnings to follow ethics rules, Ben Carson, the Housing and Urban Development secretary, let his son help organize an agency event and invite individuals with whom he had potential business dealings.
• The administration has eliminated regulations that were lobbied against by a company owned by a member of the president’s infrastructure council. Other members of the council — several with longstanding personal connections to Trump — hold investments in industries that would benefit from increased infrastructure spending.
• And there are likely some scandals we don’t know about because, unlike other modern presidents and candidates, Trump has refused to release his tax returns.
If you think the list above is incomplete, and I assume it is, email me at leonhardt@nytimes.
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