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
So the Live Golf is backed by the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Saudi Arabia. And they've spent an enormous amount of money trying to create a competitive league to the PGA. And in the United States, the Trump family has been one of their most important partners. And so for the fourth year in a row, they have had the tournament now at the Trump Durrell in Saudi Arabia.
outside of Miami, not far from the Miami airport. I was there for the tournament this year. But this is the first time that Trump has been president of the United States in the White House while there is a Saudi-funded golf tournament at his club in Florida. In the previous years, he was in the private sector, so whatever. It doesn't really matter. But now...
You have effectively the Saudi sovereign wealth fund paying money to the Trump family while Trump is president of the United States. And the United States has massive foreign policy interests with the Saudi Arabia. It's thinking about selling them F-35 fighter jets. It's thinking about giving them nuclear technology to help them build their nuclear industry. And so –
What I saw when I was down there at Trump Darrell and I there on the golf course was the governor of the public investment fund of the Saudi Arabia. He's effectively runs more capital than just about any place, anyone else in the world, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. And he is also the head of live golf. And he was there on the golf course as the tournament was getting started.
And Eric Trump was there as well. And Donald Trump had been there the night before I got there. So it's another conflict of interest. You have the Saudi Arabia paying money through Live Golf to the Trump family at the same time as in the next couple of weeks, President Trump is on his way to Saudi Arabia to talk about foreign policy matters.
Yeah, I mean, it's something that's just developed in recent days and several of them actually cited our stories as a factor in it.
Yeah. And so I think that they are demanding that the Republicans give them some concessions. And I do suspect that there will be a resolution of this and that I know that there are conversations ongoing right now between Republicans.
Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to try to see if they can reach a resolution because there's a lot of Democrats that are supportive of trying to help the cryptocurrency industry continue to mature in the United States. And I think that there are some Democrats who really want to see the president's family banned from actually participating in the stablecoin industry.
And that's a bigger ask that I sort of wonder whether or not Republicans, I doubt the Republicans would agree to that. There could be some modifications made in the legislation that would tighten language around anti-money laundering, that's more likely to occur.
But what's clear is that the Democrats sort of see this as an important moment to pause and to use the clout that they have, because you need at least 60 votes to get something called cloture to move ahead on debate and to vote on legislation in the Senate. And they're using that clout to kind of, they see this as a moment of opportunity to raise some of these issues
And to demand potentially some concessions from Republicans. And that's playing out as we speak.
Well, as we record this right now on Tuesday, the House Financial Services Democrats had planned to stand up and walk out of a House hearing as a form of protest to go to do their own hearing in which they're going to open an investigation into Trump's crypto assets.
They're so frustrated that there has been so little scrutiny of it and little response from Republicans that they're going to have kind of a show by walking out today and demanding that this be investigated. So the Democrats clearly have decided that this is an issue they want to engage on and that they want to try to elevate the national awareness of this issue.
And that's happening on a daily basis right now.
It was great. And of course, it's sort of cool to have a member of Congress read a story that you wrote. But what was most important to me is that there be more accountability and transparency. And I think that happens when people are aware of what's happening. And her reading it helps increase the awareness.
And that's really what we're doing here by writing about these things is trying to make the American public and really the world more aware of the conflicts of interest that we're seeing and that we're trying to document.
Thank you.
That's the somewhat startling thing to me as a reporter at this moment is that there's really no one else beyond us, the team that's working on it from the New York Times and other journalists. Because just in the last few days, Trump fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics. He's removed the inspectors general across the government, at least 17 of them.
The Congress is controlled by Republicans, so therefore the Democrats who might be more critical of him don't have subpoena power, and they don't really therefore have significant investigative powers. And the Department of Justice is controlled by someone who's completely loyal to Trump.
So there really is not much of an investigative capacity or an investigative desire beyond reporters that are attempting to drill into this without subpoena power.
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