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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · How Trump made an estimated $2.2 billion last year · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

Yeah, so Lutnik, before he became the Commerce Secretary, he was running a company called Cantor Fitzgerald, which has a bunch of arms.

But one of the things that they do is they help startups raise capital.

And so what we found was that at the same time as Howard Lutnik is promoting the United States as an investor in mining companies –

His Cantor Fitzgerald has been helping some of the same mining companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars in private capital.

So as Commerce Secretary, he and his role on some of the bodies like the Export-Import Bank and other federal agencies, those agencies have notified these companies that we're going to give you billions of dollars of financing.

And on the other side, the sons of Lutnik have been bringing them private financing and they get paid fees

And one of the reasons that the companies need private dollars is that the federal government has come and said, we're going to give you public financing.

So all of a sudden, it's a lot easier for them to go to Wall Street and say, look, the federal government is giving us billions of dollars in financing.

So don't you want to invest in us?

So then his sons are there basically through their companies and raising private capital for these same mining companies.

And they get paid fees right away.

Whether or not those mining companies succeed or fail,

they're going to get paid a fee and they've made those fees.

So what we found was there were almost a dozen companies that the Trump administration has agreed to help finance that the LUTNIC companies have also done work with

to help them raise capital since the beginning of 2025.

So there's this, again, an intertwining of the public policy actions that the dad is taking and the private sector profitability that's coming from the actions that the sons are doing.

It's a similar thing that's happening with the Trump sons that's happening with the Lutnick sons.

Now, again, both the White House and the Commerce Department and Cantor Fitzgerald each assert that there are no conflicts of interest

that the Trump sons are independent business people who are making decisions to pursue their own business interests.

And Cantor Fitzgerald makes the point, which is true, is that it had been in the mining sector for a number of years and it's continuing to help its partners raise capital.

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