Corruption in Plane Sight

Qatar might gift Donald Trump a “Palace in the Air”—a $400 million jet for his official and personal use.

Photo: Nathan Howard / Reuters

Republicans in the House spent two years investigating and threatening impeachment against President Joe Biden for allegedly accepting $5 million in bribes from a Ukrainian company. That turned out to be completely fabricated, and the informant who intentionally passed along bogus information to try and frame the president is now sitting in federal prison.

So when a foreign government recently bribed President Trump by offering to “gift” him a new plane worth 80 times that to use as his new Air Force One, Republicans were livid, universally denounced it, and began impeachment inquiries.

I’m kidding. There’s nothing but crickets so far from the GOP.

Trump once claimed he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any voters. Apparently, he can also accept the largest bribe in the history of our country and not suffer any consequences from his own party.

ABC News reported over the weekend that Trump was preparing to accept a plane worth $400 million from Qatar. As the new Air Force One, it would be totally decked out, a “palace in the sky,” as it were. And Trump would get to use it after his term as part of his “presidential library.”

Trump later confirmed the offer, posting on Truth Social that the offer was a gift to the Defense Department, and that the new presidential jet would be used on a temporary basis “in a very public and transparent transaction.” Officials in Qatar would not separately confirm that they had agreed to make the gift, now calling it a “possible transfer” that is “under consideration” and “under review” as outrage and opposition to the bribe mounts.

There are four things I want to note at this point.

Not without the consent of Congress

First, the Constitution expressly prohibits the President from accepting “any present, emolument, Office or Title” from any “foreign state” without approval from Congress.

The White House doesn’t get to sign off on the legality of this and simply proceed. It’s the job of Congress to ensure bribes and foreign gifts don’t happen. And by the way, the plane does count as a gift because Trump will have full personal use of it afterwards. It doesn’t matter that it will be operated initially by the Defense Department.

Now, do I expect this Congress to insist on its right to give consent to the deal? Hardly. If it’s already willing to cede its primary powers to the executive branch to appropriate funds and levy taxes, it isn’t likely to raise a fuss over something like a half billion dollar gift from a foreign terrorist-sponsoring country.

But that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the line. We could still see a lawsuit filed over this. The main question, left unresolved by the Supreme Court, is who actually has standing to sue. Efforts in the past by congressmembers to bring an action under the Emoluments Clause got knocked back for lack of any identifiable harm to them. Other cases got dismissed because they took too long and were dismissed as moot because by January 21, 2021, Trump was no longer president.

Perhaps a competitor airplane manufacturer like Airbus would have standing to sue. After all, it will have lost out to Boeing on the chance to bid to be the supplier of the craft.

The grift that keeps on grifting

When the story broke about the Qatari plane, the White House responded by claiming that the Attorney General herself had looked at the deal and concluded it did not violate any bribery statutes or the Emoluments Clause.

She’s dead wrong, but there’s a more fundamental problem. Bondi was a paid foreign agent of Qatar before becoming the AG. You really can’t make this up. As Semafor reported,

In July 2019, Bondi, a partner in the DC office of the powerful lobbying group Ballard Partners, was registered through the firm to influence Capitol Hill on human trafficking issues on behalf of the Gulf state for a fee of $115,000 per month.

If you do the math, that’s $1.38 million a year. That’s serious money, and Bondi’s hands are dirty with it. She has no business advising Trump on whether her former clients can give her new boss a huge gift. She should have recused herself from advising him on the gift, but that would require an understanding of and adherence to professional and legal ethics.

Other Trump officials are also funded by Qatar, including FBI Director Kash Patel. As Public Citizen noted in its letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee prior to the vote on Patel’s confirmation,

It was revealed publicly for the first time after the Judiciary Committee’s Nomination Hearing for Mr. Patel had concluded that Mr. Patel was paid an unspecified amount of money by the Embassy of Qatar to provide it with “consulting services” until November 2024. Mr. Patel did not register as a foreign agent and disclose this work for the Embassy of Qatar in the FARA database and did not disclose this work to Senators on his Senate Nominee Questionnaire.

Qatar has funded several other Trump family members and officials. These include Jared Kushner, whose investment firm raised $1.5 billion from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates; EPA head Lee Zeldin, who was paid an undisclosed amount by Heritage Advisors, a venture capital firm run by a member of the Qatari royal family; and former Trump campaign consultants Barry Bennett and Doug Watts, who were charged with and accepted a deferred prosecution deal for accepting Qatari money to influence U.S. policy in the Middle East and misleading investigators about those dealings.

We need to see Qatar’s gift of the plane to Donald Trump in the context of a wider plan to buy influence within the Trump family and within our wider government, official by official.

Democratic officials, led by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) of the House Ethics Committee, who called it a “flying grift,” have called for an official review by the Inspector General. It’s small wonder Trump wants all of those inspectors fired, too.

A security nightmare

Third, Air Force One isn’t just a plane. It’s a mobile command and control center. Letting another country “gift” it to our president presents a host of issues.

The Secret Service faces a “security nightmare,” one law enforcement source told CNN. “The (US Air Force) would have to tear it apart looking for surveillance equipment and inspect the integrity of the plane,” the source said. CNN noted that that process would have to begin with the White House Communications Agency, which would then ask U.S. intelligence to conduct a countermeasures sweep.

For a gift that big, and with a president demonstrably willing to expose our national secrets, the issues wouldn’t end even following the sweep. Would Trump permit nonsecure procedures, equipment or personnel on board? Is there some kind of quid pro quo in place allowing Qatar access or insight to what gets decided on board?

As Professor Juliette Kayyem of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government noted, “The surveillance and security aspects are also as disturbing as the grift. Qatar will surely offer a plane that satisfies their needs as well.”

An inescapable conflict

Fourth, let’s remember that Qatar is not some benevolent, neutral player. It is the primary funder of the Hamas terrorist organization.

When the President and his family members and advisors take hundreds of millions or even billions from that country, it sets up an immediate conflict of interest. We will never know whether they are fashioning policy in the best interest of our country or Qatar, the benefactor that lines their pockets. (Hint: It’s almost certainly the latter. After all, that’s the whole point of the bribes and the money spigot.)

Already, Trump is deeply in bed with the Qataris, having announced just 12 days ago that he is building a $5.5 billion luxury golf resort there that includes Trump-branded beachside villas. That’s Billion with a B.

These kinds of unprecedented foreign investments, along with gifts of a magnitude of a “palace in the sky,” make it impossible for Trump to act against Qatar without harming his own business dealings.

The late Jimmy Carter famously had to put his peanut farm into a blind trust to avoid even the possibility of a conflict of interest. Granted, it was a big farm, and his brother Billy who managed it had taken out a lot of big loans. Still, it was the right thing to do because the White House is supposed to be beyond reproach or suspicion so its occupant can do the work of the people.

It’s not supposed to be what this White House has now clearly become: the center of an international criminal enterprise, that, just over 100 days in, is already fully steeped in corruption, bribery and grift.

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Jay