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US POLITICS ... DEMOCRATS Congressman Jamie Raskin Brian Tyler Cohen: Raskin drops BAD NEWS on Trump over $400 million corruption scheme Original article: Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess
Raskin drops BAD NEWS on Trump over $400 million corruption scheme Brian Tyler Cohen May 11, 2025 4.4M subscribers ... 892,080 views ... 47K likes For more from Brian Tyler Cohen: Straight-news titled YouTube: / @briantylercohennews YouTube (español): / @briantylercohenespanol Order my #1 NYT bestselling book: https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/s... Newsletter: https://plus.briantylercohen.com Twitch: / briantylercohen Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/36UvEHs Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0066rKC... Twitter: / briantylercohen Instagram: / briantylercohen Facebook: / briantylercohen TikTok: / briantylercohen Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/briantylerco... Threads: https://www.threads.net/@briantylercohen How this content was made Auto-dubbed Audio tracks for some languages were automatically generated. Learn more Brian Tyler Cohen Transcript 0:00 i'm joined now by Congressman Jamie Raskin thanks so much for joining thanks to be with you Brian so you have been focused on the issue of amaluments violations for years and years and years now we have just seen the biggest example of Donald Trump violating that clause in the new reporting that just came out from ABC News saying that Donald Trump is going to accept a $400 million luxury jet that's going to serve as Air Force One and then ultimately be transferred over to him personally through his Presidential Library Foundation first and foremost is this legal no it's not consistent with the constitution unless the president comes to Congress and asks whether he can receive this gift because article 1 section 9 clause 8 of the constitution the foreign amaluments clause says that no person occupying any office of uh profit or trust in the United States that includes the president um shall receive from a prince king or foreign state uh a present and a maluament which means a payment an office or title of 1:00 any kind whatever without the consent of Congress so uh if you want to take uh you know a $5,000 uh vacation gift or a $100,000 check or a $400 million uh jet you got to come to Congress first to ask i mean there's a a great story about Abraham Lincoln who received from the king of Sam a beautiful elephant tusk it was in the middle of the Civil War and Lincoln took the foreign monuments clause so seriously like pretty much every other president that he came to Congress and he said 'I love this tusk can I keep it?' And Congress met and they said 'Hey you're doing a great job in the war honest and we love you but no you can't keep that turn that over to the uh Department of the Interior.' What do you make of Pam Bondi's justification here her kind of um legal gymnastics where she says 'Well it's not going directly to Donald Trump it'll be transferred from Qatar to the Air Force and then 2:00 over to his presidential library foundation and so it's not a direct gift from Qatar it's just there's there's an intermediary which is the US government well it is a direct gift from Qar the Qatari government is the one that announced it and it's being offered to Donald Trump who apparently is very unhappy with the state of Air Force One but he's not getting the plane that he wants or it won't be ready until 2029 um and so it's for him and then it goes to his library so it's a gift to him and to his library and uh none of that is constitutional what do you make of the fact also that you know this this was this is kind of being given the green light by Pam Bondi who of course in her past as attorney general of Florida accepted a $25,000 donation while her office was deciding whether or not to pursue fraud charges against Trump University surprise surprise she opted not to um and she was also a a paid lobbyist for the government of guitar receiving $115,000 per month and so all 3:00 of those things would suggest that this would be prime for her to recuse herself from this decision would would you agree with that well that's a kind of quaint insight you have there um you know this administration uh doesn't even dabble in uh the ethical considerations about anything they don't even stop at constitutional violations much less something that's merely statutory or ethical in nature um and and I do um fault the Democrats as much as the Republicans for this because we saw this happening in the first administration um and really that should have been the first impeachment we brought we should have uh brought an impeachment against Donald Trump for blatantly violating the emalments clause uh you know now of course it was difficult to find out everything that was going on because so much of this done is done in a clandestine way but uh the Democrats on the oversight committee 4:00 when I was ranking member in the last Congress we released a report showing uh $8 million that went directly from foreign governments to Donald Trump and that was just over a two-year period and to just five of his uh more than 500 companies um so we only scratched the surface of it but still we found $8 million going to the Trump International Hotel in DC which I uh called the Washington a monument and uh the one in Las Vegas the hotel there and uh the Trump Tower in New York but he got millions of dollars from the Chinese government from the Saudi government uh and of course that set the standard then uh there was this immediate uh payback that took place after the uh Trump uh administration the first presidency where Jared Kushner brought back a cool $2 billion from Saudi Arabia even after the Saudi sovereign national fund recommended against making you know 5:02 putting him in this role investing for Saudi Arabia but uh the homicidal crown prince uh owed Donald Trump for covering up for his uh assassination the drawing and quartering the dismembering of Jamaal Kosigible and Trump said we saved his posterior um and uh they got paid back but in any event it was going on during the administration and then immediately after the administration too well I I know that there's a reflex to to blame the Democrats but I I do want to ask what the Democrats can be doing right now what the Democrats should do in light of this and and I and I brought that caveat up at first because the really the onus should not be on the Democrats the to to be the only adults in the room like the Republicans are are grown ass adults who ostensibly also take oaths of office to defend uphold uh the Constitution and so it can't just be that we have to say 'Okay well what are you going to do to the Democrats and just kind of completely absolve the 6:01 Republicans because their corruption is just so baked into the cake but in reality their corruption is so baked into the cake and there is only one party that's looking to uphold the law and defend the Constitution and so in light of that unfortunate reality what is the recourse here what can Democrats do what will Democrats do?' Well I appreciate that and uh I'm somebody who doesn't blame the Democrats because the Democratic Party is pretty much all we got we are the party of democracy and freedom and the rule of law and constitution um but I think that all of us need to take stock of the fact that we cannot ignore corruption as a driving force of this authoritarian movement in the country and I think that it was softpedled in the first administration now the courts didn't help us because different people tried to bring lawsuits about the monoluments clause um and they kept getting thrown out on standing and other threshold doctrinal blockages um 7:03 all of which is to say it was a political question up to Congress to raise it so we cannot leave this alone both for constitutional reasons as I have felt for a long time but also for political reasons because people understand this is a scam and a ripoff donald Trump and his family have made more than a billion dollars a month since this nightmare started in 2025 through the new crypto grift right uh which is all the rage within the Trump administration and you know this makes the Trump Hotel look like a Cub Scout meeting because if tens of millions were flowing in through the Trump Hotel and the golf courses now it's hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that is coming in in an almost completely covert secretive way a lot of it from abroad through the meme coins and the other crypto mechanisms they've set up i understand that that what he's doing right now is a violation of the 8:00 Constitution but it's also true that the Constitution in and of itself isn't self-executing and there is no enforcement mechanism in the Constitution and so how h how do you push back against what he's doing if he's violating the Amaluments Clause then then what is the what is the vehicle to actually seek some recourse here doesn't somebody have to be harmed and I mean could you make the argument that that it's all of the American people that are being harmed does that mean that anybody would be be able to bring suit against this president yeah well unfortunately the courts have rejected that approach the courts have really uh repudiated the idea that there's a private right of action that any citizen can bring against violations of the monuments clause they're really treating it like a political question which means it's up to Congress to act and if you've got a compliant majority within Congress then we've got a serious problem so we've got to raise hell over this and then the moment we get the majorities back we must legislate to install a legislative machinery behind 9:00 the constitutional principle because it's not self-executing as you say for a long time was the president's Republicans and Democrats both really respected the idea that there's a difference between being president of the United States and being in business for yourself and making money and they accepted what the founders anticipated which was a wall of separation between the official conduct of the president and then private moneymaking they thought the president would just set that aside for four years or eight years or what have you um which is why we have not just a foreign emoluments clause but a domestic emolements clause that says the president is limited to his salary in office and cannot be collecting any other money from government agencies and departments or states and that's another clause that Donald Trump has been systematically trampling and violating by collecting millions of dollars from other parts of the government including the Secret Service and the State Department and Commerce and other agencies and departments that went and 10:00 stayed at his hotels and golf courses and so on well I think part of part of the raising hell right now that we're engaged in is explaining to people in this country more broadly why this matters why does it impact them we can see that it's wrong but a lot of people just don't care about process they're not worried about defending institutions that they don't think are are working on their behalf anyway and so why is this particular issue so important and how can it more broadly impact the American people well um there was an interesting book that I read during the first Trump administration called The Dictators Handbook by Olter Smith and Bruce Bueno Deoskita uh which tells the story of why corruption really lies at the heart of authoritarianism because authoritarianism is always about the rule of a small minority in society of the wealthiest most powerful people against everybody else and so how do you motivate the people on the inside to stay engaged and to stay loyal to the leader it's through corrupt griffs and 11:01 you can look at you know the way that Vladimir Putin has his oligarchs all of whom are billionaires and he gives them a franchise he gets a kickback but then those people prop up the system but what that means is everybody else is getting ripped off and so just like in America today uh Trump and his family and his friends are getting just obscenely wealthy by what they're doing they're also trying to uh destroy Social Security Medicare Medicaid any program that actually gets resources to the people they want to transfer that through tax breaks again to the wealthiest people in the country that's the only program they've got an upward redistribution of wealth well I'm going to switch topics a little bit but it's on the same general theme of a descent into authoritarianism and that is this idea that was floated by Steven Miller um that the administration is going to look into suspending habius corpus which is basically what prevents anybody in 12:00 this country from being uh disappeared by our federal government being being held without any due process we've seen that play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play it itself out to to a degree with um with these these legal residents with Kilimar Brea Garcia who was sent off to uh to El Salvador but but habius corpus would prevent the rest of us from really um suffering that same fate i'm going to throw to a clip right now of Senator John Baraso i want to talk about something that one of President Trump's top aids Steven Miller said this week he said the administration is actively looking at suspending habius corpus just for our audience that's the right to challenge a person's detention by the government this would be a part of the broader efforts uh to speed up their deportation policies the Constitution says that habius corpus may not be suspended quote unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion would you vote to suspend habius corpus since the power does ultimately lie with Congress 13:00 the president has said he will follow the law the president says if he disagrees with the law that he will appeal those things the president was elected and he won every one of the battleground states on promising to secure the border and bring safety back to his to our communities that's exactly what he is doing people do not want to live with MS13 gang members in their communities the Democrats lost the election because they opened the borders to 10 million illegal immigrants including members of criminal cartels drug dealers gang members that's what the election was about and the president has now seen judges district judges radical district judges using their courts to set national standards and making it harder for the president to deport individuals criminals and I stand with the president and yet Senator I ju just to put a fine point on this I want to know what you would do would you vote to suspend habius corpus if this were brought before Congress ultimately this 14:02 power lies with Congress the president said he is going to follow the law he was on with you last week he said he has great great respect for the Supreme Court he said he expects the attorney general to do the right thing and I expect that the president will can you just give me a yes or no what you would do though would you support suspending habius scorpus i don't believe this is going to come to Congress what I believe is the president is going to follow the law he has said it repeatedly so Congressman that was uh Senator Brasso basically leaving the door open to supporting the suspension or elimination of habius corpus and of course he he throws in all these um these justifications like Donald Trump won the election which is apparently some mandate to be able to to go ahead and suspend the constitution can I have your reaction to what Senator Baraso said you know it's curious to me this libertarian authoritarian flip that you see so many of the right-wingers doing because when a Democrat is president 15:00 they pose like they're big champions of freedom and they're always accusing the Democrats of trampling on people's privacy rights and liberty rights and threatening habius corpus and threatening martial law the minute they get into office it becomes clear that's what their program is and then these you know pining libertarians suddenly become the most hardcore authoritarians in the world because it's all about power for them look we've only Congress has only suspended habius corpus during wartime the Civil War and World War II were the two major times uh when this happened um and in fact President Lincoln originally tried to do it by himself and the Supreme Court rebuffed that um and then Congress in 1863 uh suspended habius corpus and even today in the right wing you can hear you know people like uh Rand Paul attacking Lincoln for having unilaterally suspend suspended habius corpus it's always been understood that only Congress can 16:01 suspend habius corpus not the president that uh you know no matter how bad things get that is a congressional prerogative but Congress has only exercised it during wartime why in the hell would anybody suspend habius corpus today you got Donald Trump saying that the border has never been safer right uh there's simply no justification for it unless you wanted to impose martial law and destroy constitutional democracy in the country right and at the end of the day that does look very much like what their priority would be so uh we will leave it there congressman I appreciate your time thank you so much it's great being with you Brian 16:41 [Music]

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