Republicans are apoplectic that President Joe Biden
issued a blanket pardon for his son, Hunter, both for his existing gun and tax evasion convictions and potentially any other
shady dealings between 2014 and 2024. Meanwhile, Democrats are furious about the conflicts of interest engulfing the president-elect’s entire family.
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So, here’s a suggestion to bring the country together: Pass bipartisan legislation stating exactly what business entanglements are kosher for a president’s family members and which are not.
If a deal is dodgy when a Democratic president’s family member does it, it’s dodgy when a Republican president’s family does it, too. This presumably includes many of Hunter Biden’s sketchy transactions that the GOP has amplified and investigated, including: his payments as a board member for a
Ukrainian energy firm accused of bribery; his
multimillion-dollar deals with a
Chinese company; and his late-in-life, astonishingly lucrative turn as a
visual artist.
No legal repercussions came of those dealings despite
congressional and
Justice Department investigations. Even so, some of the particulars
do look gross. So, maybe there should be guardrails limiting the ability of family members to capitalize on their relatives in government — or at least requiring more disclosures about when such dealings occur, especially if they involve foreign entities.
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If put into place, of course, such restrictions would also ensnare virtually the
entire Trump clan — for nearly
every transaction they engage in. The Trumps’ unsubtle quids and quos make Hunter Biden’s dodgy dealings look as innocuous as a lemonade stand.
For starters, there’s Jared Kushner’s no-expectations investment fund, which he founded shortly after leaving his father-in-law’s first administration in 2021. At least
99 percent of the roughly $3 billion that Kushner raised has come from overseas sources. Of that, $2 billion was bankrolled by the Saudi government, even though the Saudi sovereign wealth fund’s own advisers had
concluded that giving Kushner money would be unwise (because of Kushner’s “inexperience” and “excessive” asset management fees, among other reasons, the New York Times reported).
Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, has been slow to make any actual investments with this money — ostensibly the point of the fund — but Kushner has continued to collect annual fees just for sitting on funders’ cash. As of September, Affinity Partners received at least
$157 million in fees from foreign clients, a Senate investigation found. Kushner has not yet returned a penny in profits to investors. (“Partisan politics aside, Affinity Partners is an S.E.C.-registered investment firm that has always acted appropriately and any suggestion to the contrary is false,” the company’s legal officer said in a statement to the Times.)
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To be fair, Kushner did all this after leaving Trump’s first administration, and Trump has not named him to any formal role in the second. But Hunter Biden never had
any government role. Meanwhile, one of the other principals at Kushner’s fund,
Kevin Hassett, will serve in both Trump terms: He starts next month as Trump’s top economic adviser.
Kushner also appeared to profit from his role in government back while he was still (supposedly) serving the American people. Recall that the
Qatari sovereign wealth fund bailed out a different Kushner investment while he was still overseeing Middle East policy
in the White House.
These are hardly the only cases of apparent influence-peddling from Trump’s offspring or their spouses. His sons have been hawking a family crypto project, World Liberty Financial. It was initially a bust, with sales falling
90 percent short of the company’s initial goal. But like the president-elect, World Liberty made a striking comeback last month. Corporate executives have been
gobbling up tokens, presumably hoping to curry favor with the Trump kids or the next president himself.
Take Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who recently gained fame for buying a $6 million banana, who was charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. (His company says the charge “
lacks merit.”) Sun announced last week that he had bought
$30 million in World Liberty tokens, making him the project’s biggest investor.
“World Liberty Financial can be a beacon to move forward the whole blockchain industry in the U.S.,” Sun gushed to
Bloomberg about a crypto product that until recently had been worthless.
These are not the only conflicts of interest afflicting the incoming Trump administration. Plenty of other
senior administration picks — including people unrelated to the president-elect by either blood or marriage — have
financial entanglements that present serious problems. Trump himself is a
minefield of conflicts, with business dealings
both in the United States and abroad.
All of these people
chose to occupy public office, unlike most family members of presidents (or vice presidents); surely the constraints on their financial concerns should be stricter. At the very least, Republican lawmakers angry about the foreign dealings of the outgoing president’s kid can act on their righteous indignation by holding the next administration to a higher ethical bar. Assuming, of course, that the Hunter Biden inquisitions were ever about ethics at all.
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