All three entities paid money to Trump-owned buildings, namely Trump Tower in New York and Trump International hotels in Washington, DC and Las Vegas, Nevada.
China far and away led countries in making such payments, with the total from 20 countries reaching US$7.8 million, according to the report.
“It is true that US$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,” wrote Jamie Raskin, Democratic congressman of Maryland and the oversight committee’s ranking member, in the report’s foreword.
The former Republican president violated the US Constitution when his businesses accepted these payments without the consent of Congress, the report stated, citing the Constitution’s emoluments clause.
The emoluments clause states that “no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state”.
Ballot power: 2024 elections could steer global relations for years to come
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“These countries spent – often lavishly – on apartments and hotel stays at Donald Trump’s properties – personally enriching President Trump while he made foreign policy decisions connected to their policy agendas with far-reaching ramifications for the United States,” the report said.
It accused Trump of failing to disclose such payments to Congress and actively preventing Congress from obtaining information about them.
A businessman before his election to the White House in 2016, Trump opted to neither divest from his businesses nor put them into a blind trust after becoming president.
The investigation led to a court dispute that ended in a settlement in 2022. Soon thereafter, Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, began producing the requested documents that formed the basis of Thursday’s report.
The Chinese embassy in Washington on Thursday declined to speak on the nature of any payments made to Trump, saying it does not comment on issues related to US domestic politics.
Keep China influence probes ‘free from bias’: leading House Democrats
Keep China influence probes ‘free from bias’: leading House Democrats
Republicans have alleged that the elder Biden was involved in these deals as well.
The report further recommended that Congress toughen requirements for a US president to notify the body of emoluments.
The committee’s Republican chairman, James Comer of Kentucky, dismissed the report’s findings.
“It’s beyond parody that Democrats continue their obsession with former President Trump,” Comer said in a statement. “Former President Trump has legitimate businesses, but the Bidens do not.”
Richard Painter, a corporate law professor at the University of Minnesota who was part of a 2017 lawsuit alleging Trump violated the emoluments clause, called the former president’s situation unprecedented.
“Nobody has had any credible evidence of any other president getting a gift from a foreign government,” he said.
Painter added that the bar for a violation under the emoluments clause is different from bribery, which requires the demonstration of intent to influence an official act.
“Bribery is so hard to prove … and the founding fathers knew this.”