Eric Lipton
speaker
759 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 5 Aug
Eric Lipton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If you do that, if you are an employee of the federal government and you take an action that specifically benefits your family, that's a federal crime and you could go to jail for that. And the president is exempt from that because the president's powers are so broad, I guess the presumption is that you can't prevent the president from doing something that might benefit his family financially.
But historically, despite that exemption, presidents from both parties have – taken steps to avoid conflicts of interest by either selling off assets, putting assets into a blind trust in which they don't have any control, or trying to avoid, you know, their family being involved in financial efforts that create obvious conflicts of interest.
Now, there have been throughout history relatives of presidents that have drawn attention because of their business activities. I mean, Billy Carter, the brother of Jimmy Carter, Neil Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, obviously Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, have been engaged in business activities that have drawn assertions of conflicts of interest.
And in many cases, they were well substantiated. But when I speak with various historians who have examined these things, and as a reporter, I've looked at them myself, I've never seen so many simultaneous activities as we're seeing now with the Trump sons and President Trump himself through his financial benefits, as they're playing out right now before us.
Yeah. I mean, the thing that really is problematic is when they are doing deals that involve government entities. So, for example, they have a business partner in the Middle East called Dar Global, and they now have six ongoing real estate projects with them, most of them in the Middle East.
But Dar Global, along with Eric Trump, the president of Dar Global, was in Qatar on Wednesday of last week. And there they signed a deal that was financed by the government of Qatar and its sovereign wealth fund.
And so that effectively means that the government of Qatar and the wealth that it gets from merely the natural gas and the energy business is backed up the Trump family in a real estate deal that they're going to do there. Now, I spoke with Eric Trump about this, and he says, well, Qatar is helping Dar Global with the property that it's getting access to, and our deal is with Dar Global.
But the bottom line is that they are a part of this deal and that they were there. An official from the government of Qatar was there during the signing, standing right in front of Eric Trump. And to have the family of the president –
in a business deal with a foreign government at the same time as President Trump is about to fly over there and do foreign policy matters with various states in the Middle East, including Qatar, is, you know, what are his imperatives there?
When he makes a foreign policy decision, is he doing it because it's in the interest of the United States or is he doing it because it helps his business interest in that same country? It's an open question.
It's a very small nation. It's a peninsula that sticks out into the Gulf there, but it's a hugely important one. Very wealthy nation. There's a large military base. The United States has more military assets there than just any place else in the Middle East, also in Bahrain nearby. But That's a very important place to the United States military.
They also play a critical role as an intermediary between a number of the nations and the tensions that exist in the Middle East between Israel and Iran and Saudi Arabia and other nations. So there's a huge foreign policy agenda that involves that country. And so how are the United States foreign policy interests being influenced by the Trump family's financial interests?
In this case, as World Liberty is launching at Stablecoin, they overnight become one of the biggest Stablecoin issuers in the world. And Stablecoins are one of the most profitable chunks of the whole cryptocurrency atmosphere. because they can take this yield and keep it for themselves. And the 3% yield that they get off of investing that stable coin.
So what happened here is that the government of Abu Dhabi, which decided from the United Arab Emirates that they were going to put money into another company called Binance, they decided they were going to do it through World Liberty. So they were going to deposit $2 billion into World Liberty. And that was going to come from this United Arab Emirate sovereign wealth fund, effectively.
So, I mean, again, here you now have a Middle Eastern government that's going to put $2 billion of its capital into a company that financially benefits President Trump and his sons. At the same time that the United States has enormous foreign policy matters before the United Arab Emirates relative to China.
you know, maybe military sales of weapons, maybe whether or not they get access to certain advanced American computer chips that they need to develop their artificial intelligence industry. Enormous choices that President Trump has to make.
How are they influenced by the fact that this same government has now put $2 billion into a company that his family runs and that is going to bring him and his family tens of millions of dollars in revenues as a result? It's a kind of a conflict of interest we really just we have never seen before in probably all of American history, if not at a minimum, modern American history.
That, again, he's both the regulator and the commander in chief, and he is the financial beneficiary of, you know, trades that are happening that he effectively oversees.
Yeah, Don Jr. is in... Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania. And in Serbia, for example, at a site that the United States bombed along with NATO during the Balkan War when Clinton was president, the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense has been sitting there as a sort of semi-destroyed structure for decades now.
And the president of Serbia and his administration have decided that Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law, should be allowed to build a luxury hotel and apartment complex on that site, which has sat vacant for decades. And that site would then have a Trump International Hotel in Serbia, the first in Europe.
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