President Donald Trump’s sons are criss-crossing the globe, striking lucrative business deals that may benefit Trump personally — but Rep. James Comer, who investigated the Biden family’s business dealings during the last Congress and introduced a presidential ethics bill last year, really wants to make clear the Trumps don’t worry him.
“I’m not worried about anything the Trumps are doing,” the Kentucky Republican told NOTUS on Tuesday. “I want you to write this down: I’m not worried about anything the Trumps are doing business-wise, because they’re being transparent. Unlike the Bidens.”
Recent Trump family ventures include a residential tower in Saudi Arabia, cryptocurrency businesses, a villa in Qatar and a high-end private club set to open in Washington D.C., with a name referencing Trump’s position: the “Executive Branch.”
Democrats fear those deals are avenues for foreign governments to influence policy, and that Trump’s family is using the White House to get richer. Some interest groups are open about it: A Mexico-based shipping company executive said recently that he would spend $20 million on Trump’s personal bitcoin tokens to “advocate for fair, balanced and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.”
But Comer brushed off questions about the Trump family’s business ventures, arguing that because the public knows about many of Trump’s sons’ deals and because they often post online about their travel and activities, they aren’t much of an ethics problem.
He also told NOTUS he doesn’t expect to reintroduce his presidential ethics bill this year, which would require the president and his immediate family members to be more open about their business interests and trips abroad. If the House were to consider it, he said, then “the whole media is going to be focused on that ethics bill,” and it probably wouldn’t win enough support to get 60 votes in the Senate.
“The only way you’re going to get a bill through Congress to reform it is when it affects the next administration,” Comer said, pointing to Democrats for not helping pass it last year. “I argued that the last time. I said, ‘You all will be complaining if Trump wins, because he’s a business guy and there’s going to be things that will arise. Let’s get this through.’ And they go, ‘No, no, there’s no way Trump’s going to win.’”
Comer’s bill, introduced alongside Democrat Katie Porter last summer, would mandate new reporting requirements for the president, vice president and their immediate family members. Some Democrats at the time said they believed the effort was too partisan, because it was attached to Comer while he was investigating Hunter Biden.
“We won’t be able to use the bill and impose it on Trump, because he’s not going to win in November,” Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Florida Democrat, told NOTUS at the time.
Comer on Tuesday blamed his former Democratic counterpart on the House Oversight Committee. It was “a shame that Jamie Raskin killed the bill,” he said.
Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, responded to that remark with withering sarcasm: “I was completely unaware that as the ranking member of the Oversight committee, I had the power to kill bills that the chairman of the committee wanted. That didn’t seem to work for any other bill.”
Raskin told NOTUS he wanted the ethics bill to go further, enforcing the Constitution’s emoluments clause — which bans officials from accepting gifts from foreign governments — and to explicitly apply that ban to business transactions.
“The truth is that the presidency is now drenched in corruption,” Raskin said. “We should have acted when I made an offer to Chairman Comer to create truly bipartisan legislation to rebuild the wall of separation between the finances of the president and the work of the presidency.”
Republicans on Tuesday didn’t sound too worried. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas dismissed a question about the president’s bitcoin sales, saying he’s too busy to think about it.
“I’ve got a bunch of problems I’m trying to solve without going chasing those kinds of rabbit trails,” he told NOTUS. “I have no idea about that story.”
And Sen. Rand Paul declined to comment, saying he doesn’t have any “personal knowledge” of the Trump family’s businesses.
Comer said he can envision reintroducing his bill during the final year of Trump’s presidency, when he thinks it might have another chance at becoming law.
“The time to do it,” he said, “is in the last year of the last administration to apply to the next president before you know who it’s going to be.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.