Congress put rules in place ages ago to ensure that federal appointees and employees (including judges) don’t use their jobs to enrich themselves.

The "Office of Government Oversight" vets those officials for conflicts of interest and can compel them and their spouses and minor children to dispense with assets deemed likely to create a conflict.

For our purposes, all you need to know is that those rules don’t apply to the president, vice-president, or federal lawmakers
—which is stupid, but whatever.

️The Constitution, however, does place limits on elected federal officials.

The president is entitled to a predetemined salary and that’s all.

He is forbidden from taking anything further of value from the federal governments or any state government.

Furthermore, without the consent of Congress, no federal officeholder may accept “any present, #Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

This is not ambiguous. It means no foreign money, period.

Yet President Donald Trump’s affairs are awash in foreign money. (Domestic, too.)

Among other problems, foreign governments have rented units at Trump Tower,
booked rooms and events at his hotels and resorts,
and approved his company’s overseas deals and developments
—not to mention those of son-in-law Jared Kushner,
whose private equity fund got a $2 billion investmentfrom a Saudi sovereign wealth fund shortly after he left the White House,
and whose new partnership with the Trump Organization opens a very problematic new can of worms.

Trump “received significant payments and benefits from foreign governments” during his first term, says Noah Bookbinder,
the executive director since 2015 of Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington ( #CREW ), which two years later sued Trump in an emoluments case that focused on Trump’s DC hotel,
and served as outside counsel in a similar lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia.

The hotel, operating out of a federal building, became a mecca for both foreign governments and American companies and CEOs who hoped to curry favor with the administration.

“The research we’ve done, combined with what the House did, suggest that more than $13 million
—potentially much, much more
—came to his businesses from foreign governments,” Bookbinder told me.

These legal actions were upheld by federal appeals courts, but they dragged on
and the Supreme Court declared them moot on January 25, 2021,
as Trump was no longer in office.

“As a legal matter, it is as though [our cases] never existed.

And so even those favorable appeals decisions don’t have any precedential value,” Bookbinder says.

That was tough to stomach, and now Trump is back at the trough without any further guardrails
—or consequences paid.

He was in “clear violation of provisions intended to protect the public from corruption,” Bookbinder says,
“and it’s very, very hard, it turns out, to get courts to enforce them
—or get anybody to enforce them.

That’s deeply frustrating, and one more example of Trump finding ways to be lawless.”

CREW is now in a triage process to determine its priorities,
and which legal actions might stand a chance of success
—such as the lawsuit it and other groups filed earlier this week to challenge the actions of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

In any case, Bookbinder says, the public can expect more influence-peddling during Trump’s second term,
only now “there are factors that create the risk of emoluments at a much higher level.”

Prior to the election, CREW cited four primary areas of concern,
not merely for conflicts of interest
—that would be a very long list
—but where Trump is likely in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses.

And now there are five areas,
because only days before he was sworn in, a Trump-controlled entity called
"World Liberty Financial" launched a pair of “meme” cryptocurrencies:
$TRUMP and $MELANIA.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/donald-trump-second-term-conflicts-interest-crew-emoluments-lawsuit-cash-foreign-governments-constitution/