Transcription
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Each deeply reported account of self-dealing from the Trump White House seems to get more brazen than the one that came before it. The New York Times has now reviewed a number of federal filings and is out with an extraordinary piece of investigative reporting that details the latest way that Donald Trump's family and allies appear to be profiting off Donald Trump's policy decisions as president. It involves a billion-dollar mining deal with Kazakhstan, and one that both Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's son stand to profit from.
In a meeting last September, Donald Trump and Howard Lutnick secured a deal with the leader of Kazakhstan to give a little-known American company now called Kaz Resources access to one of the world's largest untapped reserve of tungsten. It's a crucial rare-earth mineral. Here's where the apparent self-dealing comes in.
According to The New York Times, weeks after that meeting, quote, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president's two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20% stake in the corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project. Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Howard Lutnick's family and overseen by his sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raised $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fundraising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees. The deal was, quote, ultimately signed on November 6th, six days after the investment involving the Trump sons and their partners, which was not publicly disclosed at the time.
As The New York Times reports, this continues a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history. When asked for statements, both the White House and the Commerce Department rejected any suggestion that the Trump administration was improperly mixing government actions with family business. Trump's sons both denied being involved in the specifics of the deal. Eric Trump claimed they were passive investors. A Cantor Fitzgerald spokesperson said that company's executives were not involved in discussions related to government funding. And Dominari Securities didn't respond to the Times' request for comment.
Joining our conversation is Donald Sherman, the president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Our crew, Hauman is still with us. Donald, what's so interesting about the story, if the reporting doesn't leave you gobsmacked, is that the denials are so parsed that they don't actually undermine any of the gobsmacking reporting. That's right. The administration, the administration and the president's family would have us believe that Don Jr. and Eric are the luckiest passive investors in the history of passive of investment. You know, we've got a situation where regular folks are struggling every day with rising costs of groceries, energy, housing, and everyday items like that. And the Trumps have had the most lucrative year of their lives, profiting off the presidency. They've made billions in the last 18 months. And we're supposed to believe that this is all just happening to do this happenstance.
I want to read a little bit more from this Times report. It's long, but it's worth, it's worth a thorough read. The Times reports this, quote, one or both families, that's the Trumps and the Lutniks, have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project, according to federal filings examined by The New York Times. All 14 of these companies have either benefited directly from offers of financial assistance from the Trump administration or have pending permit applications before the Commerce Department overseen by Lutnick, according to the Times. The total amount of federal funding that the Trump administration has provided or is considering providing to the companies exceeds $8.9 billion, according to public statements by the companies and the federal government. Again, this is a piece of reporting based on documents and that's what's on paper. This is extraordinary.
Yeah, and I think, Nicole, there are two things to say about this, one of which is relates to Howard Lutnick. Again, we all have been spending a lot of time with the Swan and Haberman book. And one of the things that comes through in their reporting about Trump and Lutnick is that, you know, it's not like Donald Trump has a lot of respect for Howard Lutnick. You kind of get the sense that there's a point where he refers to Lutnick in a very unflattering way. And they ask him about it in their interview, the fact-check interview at the end of the book. He doesn't deny it. He doesn't swat it away. He basically sort of seems to treat Lutnick a little bit the way he used to treat Rudy Giuliani, with a kind of very thinly veiled contempt. This is a person who's not obviously qualified to be the secretary of commerce, but his degree of disqualification is not as gratuitous as some others. You know, we look at Pete Angsteth or Bobby Kennedy Jr. They're more flagrantly unqualified. Howard Lutnick, because of his history of Cantor Fitzgerald, is at least kind of on paper qualified, but in every aspect of his behavior that we've seen in Trump 2.0, he's not a serious person. And this makes you ask the question, if Trump doesn't really think he's a serious person and kind of demeans him behind his back, and he's not a serious person, a person serious enough to have the job he has, why is he there? Well, this story gives you an idea of why he's there. He's there because he can help enrich the Trump, he can help enrich the Trump family. He has those kind of connections and is willing to do this kind of stuff that anybody with any real sense of ethics or appreciation for the requirements, ethical requirements of government service never would. That's the first thing.
The second thing is the last thing you said, which is you made this cut, you said that this is all really good reporting and it's all on paper, right? And I guess what I would say about that is I think that there has been incredible reporting about corruption and the degree of it in this, in this Trump 2.0 period. And I think that it has only begun to scratch the surface. I think that when all is said and done, the degree, we are shocked every day by the scale of it and the brazenness of it. And I think that we are only seeing 10% of the iceberg. We're not seeing anything like what is really going on. And I think when some of the great books that will be written about this second Trump term will be those written by investigative reporters who do work or the kind of people who investigated Enron and things like that, who are going to go back and dig through the money story. Because that is going to be at the center of Trump's legacy, his defilement of the White House, of the unprecedented things he's done, but also by just how freaking rich he got off of all of this. And there are going to be a lot of breadcrumbs once he's out of office, and I think we're all going to look back and say, wow, we thought that it was brazen, and we thought that it was beyond our wildest imaginations of how large it was, and it turns out we only knew about a tenth of the story.
I mean, Donald, are there breadcrumbs in this reporting that will put in motion lawsuits from crew? Well, there's certainly breadcrumbs there that demand oversight. And I think hopefully we don't have to wait for those breadcrumbs to be revealed if Congress does its job. There are details there and there are strings that should be pulled, including around the timing of these deals, the timing of Cantor Fitzgerald's financial relationships with some of these companies, the timing around the Trump sons' investments in these companies that demand oversight right now. If Secretary Lutnick was involved in greenlighting a funding deal that financially benefits a company that his sons own, that would likely violate the ethics rules for executive branch employees. There's potential criminal implications. And then the Commerce Office of Inspector General should be taking a look at Secretary Lutnick's activities right now. Congress should be asking questions, but of course the congressional majority is not doing their job. And certainly if Congress changes hands, I would have Secretary Lutnick before Congress sooner than later. So we don't have to wait until after the Trump presidency is over to find out why $8.9 billion in taxpayer funds are being invested in so many companies that just happen to have ties to President Trump's sons and Secretary Lutnick's sons.