Jamie Raskin Uncovers Proof Of Trump's Foreign Bribes

Let this be a wakeup call to the rest of the party: digging for dirt is worth it

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On Thursday, House oversight committee Democrats released a 150 page report detailing a subset of payments Donald Trump accepted from foreign governments and entities while he was president, including $5.6 million from China alone.  

It’s the best-documented confirmation we have that Trump spent his entire presidency on the take, in violation of the Constitution’s foreign-emoluments clause—which makes it fitting that the lead author of the report is the committee’s ranking member, Jamie Raskin, who wanted to impeach Trump for soliciting and accepting these bribes back in 2019 and 2020. The leadership shut him down.

It’s a shame that Raskin wasn’t House speaker in 2019 and 2020. If he had been, Trump’s bribe-taking, and the way he turned the presidency into a profit-seeking enterprise, would have been major focal points of a broad oversight agenda, rather than a footnote to a half-hearted one. He instead had to do the bulk of this work in the minority, after Democrats had lost their compulsory powers, and was limited to working with the scant evidence that was already in Congress’s possession.

That evidence came from Mazars, Trump’s former accounting firm, which began turning over documents to the House in late 2022 after Trump waged lengthy, dilatory court battles to keep them concealed. They weren’t intended to provide a comprehensive look at Trump’s foreign financial entanglements, and they don’t even create the complete accounting record the House was entitled to, because Republicans terminated the document production when they took over.

As Raskin writes in the report, “we know about only some of the payments that passed into former President Trump’s hands during just two years of his presidency from just 20 of the more than 190 nations in the world through just four of his more than 500 businesses.”

Despite the Constitution’s requirement that a president disclose foreign emoluments and seek Congress’s consent to keep them, it took Oversight Committee Democrats years of aggressive litigation against the former President to obtain the subset of documents from Mazars, Donald Trump’s accounting firm, that form the factual basis of this report. And then, in January 2023, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer made the abrupt and outrageous decision to release Mazars from having to continue complying with the Committee’s subpoena and court-supervised settlement agreement. Despite Chairman Comer’s decision to bury further evidence, however, even this small slice of a picture of unknown proportions allows America to glimpse the rampant illegality and corruption of the Trump presidency. It is true that $7.8 million is almost certainly only a fraction of Trump’s harvest of unlawful foreign state money, but this figure in itself is a scandal and a decisive spur to action. 

Trump’s corruption runs much deeper, in other words, but this is what we had to work with, and just look at what we found. Rather than relitigate bygone mistakes of 2019 and 2020, then, let’s consider how the information Democrats did manage to dig up can best be exploited. 

BEHIND THE RASK

Raskin introduces the information he’s uncovered in a manner designed to embarrass Republicans and expose their bad faith. I like that about it. They shut this investigation down, while wasting years searching for evidence that Joe Biden engaged in foreign bribe-taking, and when they found nothing, they just insisted he did the crime anyhow. Democrats managed to actually prove the case against Trump even without control of the gavel, demonstrating by implication that the Republicans have effectively exonerated Biden—if the goods were there, they would’ve found them by now!

Raskin writes, “Instead of honoring the court-approved settlement, Chairman [James] Comer made clear what he planned to do: “I know exactly what I’m investigating: money the Bidens received from China.” As promised, Chairman Comer halted any further document productions relating to President Trump’s receipt of foreign payments—from China or any other country—and launched an investigation of President Joseph Biden’s son, which to date has produced no evidence of any constitutional or criminal wrongdoing by President Biden.” 

That’s good infowars, and it generated this pitch-perfect lede from the New York Times: 

Donald J. 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.

The transactions, detailed in a 156-page report called “White House For Sale” that was produced by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, offer concrete evidence that the former president engaged in the kind of conduct that House Republicans have labored, so far unsuccessfully, to prove that President Biden did as they work to build an impeachment case against him.

I’m less fond of the fact that this work went on in the background for months and months, until it was complete and its findings were dropped into the fray like a single, massive piece of ordnance. In the meantime, GOP smears couldn’t be so effectually rebutted or countered. 

Nothing in particular against Big Damning Reports! Lawyers love to write them and I like reading them. But they should be the endpoint of public investigative processes, not the entirety of them. How long have Democrats known about the $5.6 million from China? When could that piece of information have first been deployed? Do they have leads pointing to more payments to more companies from more countries?

The fact that Democrats were running a side investigation because Republicans were engaged in a coverup, and that they kept finding new, damning facts about Trump’s foreign entanglements, was valuable information in its own right; the documentation of money from the Saudis, the Qataris, the Chinese, could have been rolled out piecemeal, perhaps in response to unfounded Republican allegations that Biden’s the crook: ‘Here’s the proof that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, accepted bribes from China, including just weeks before Trump praised China’s response to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. Our investigation continues.’

A slow drip of revelations is the best way to keep a damning story in the news. If they’ve shot their shot House Democrats won’t be able to investigate much further and will have to content themselves to referring back to this report when the news cycle moves on and Republicans resume their smears. 

BURDEN OF RUF’

Senate Democrats, by contrast, could continue the investigation. They might even be able to quickly obtain the unreturned documents from Mazars. 

Imagine if upon release of Raskin’s report, a Senate Democratic chairman with jurisdiction over these foreign payments had taken up the baton: This report proves that Donald Trump accepted cash payments from foreign governments throughout his presidency, and suggests we have much more to learn; we’re going to get to the bottom of all of it.

Isn’t that a nice thought?

Instead, I’d be surprised to see any followup from the Senate at all. 

It’s a shame, because the media environment of the past several months—even just the past week—underscores the political value of digging for the sake of digging. 

All political scandals that we know about came to light somehow, but it’s in the nature of a scandal that the ways they were ultimately revealed couldn’t have been foreseen. The goal of the exposed parties was to keep something secret! 

Consider Claudine Gay, the first black president of Harvard. Gay resigned this week after she found herself in the crosshairs of right-wing activists who discovered plagiarized passages in her academic work. I’m not sure if she was even conscious when she borrowed language without attribution that she was doing something that might one day cost her a prestigious job. Most of the passages are boilerplate. But if she was, she couldn’t have known it would come to light this way! 

Republicans decided they wanted to pick a fight with some avatars of progressivism, so they hauled a few Ivy League presidents up to Capitol Hill for a hearing about antisemitism on campus, set an unsubtle, bad-faith trap for them, and then slandered them as Jew haters. 

With this new bogeyman status came scrutiny from right-wing media figures and propaganda manufacturers like Chris Rufo. They began combing through Gay’s past—the kind of muckraking they reserve only for their enemies—and came up with a firing offense. 

Set aside the fact that Gay got pushed out by other liberals, not conservatives, and for a plagiarism scandal, not anything having to do with race or antisemitism or wokeness: The reputational damage to higher-education has been immense, and for Republicans, that’s good enough. It was clearly all worth it.

It is never clear to anyone, not even devious schemers like Rufo, what fruits their efforts will bear. Republicans believe the efforts are worthwhile because they may bear fruit. Rufo can’t predict the future, he just knows that information when uncovered, and packaged just so, can hurt his political enemies. Democrats by contrast tend to act as though it’s rarely worth the effort—after all, most informational digs yield nothing of value. 

The genesis of Raskin’s report is like a good-faith version of the same contingent chain of unpredictable events.

 

Prior to and after Trump’s first impeachment, House Democrats weren’t setting traps or fishing for many revelations. But as if to prove the point I’m trying to make, the one big exception that stands out four years later is the hearing they held with Michael Cohen in early 2019. His testimony is what alerted House Democrats to the fact that Mazars possessed information that might incriminate Trump. It set in motion a chain of events that’s likely to end with Trump forbidden from doing business in New York state, and—well, whatever now becomes of this foreign-bribery scandal.

It has the potential to damage Trump and turn the GOP’s Biden impeachment from a dangerous nuisance into a joke. Four months ago I wrote, “If there’s a way to really balance out [the GOP’s revenge impeachment], it’s by competing with Republicans to fill the media’s appetite for tension and high drama: A high-profile senate investigation of Jared Kushner’s foreign bribe-taking, or Trump’s ongoing witness tampering, or…let’s just say it’s a target-rich environment. But they should work up something like an anti-impeachment, which would contrast the total absence of a case against Biden with the real corruption that defines the Trump family.”

Raskin’s report gives the Senate a running start. If any Democrats with the power to build on his investigation are reading, let this be the takeaway: Get after it.