Trump’s Businesses Got Millions From Foreign Governments While He Was President
Democrats say Trump violated Constitution by accepting at least $7.8 million from China, Saudi Arabia and other countries for leases and hotel stays
WASHINGTON—China and Saudi Arabia topped a list of 20 countries whose governments or state-linked entities pumped millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s properties while he was president, according to a new report and previously undisclosed records that shed light on Trump’s potential business conflicts as he seeks a second term.
Public documents and internal financial records obtained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee and seen by The Wall Street Journal showed that countries spent lavishly at Trump’s hotels in Washington and Las Vegas. They also shelled out for payments at his New York properties, spending a total of at least $7.8 million during his time in office.
The Chinese government and entities linked to it spent more than $5.5 million, or nine times that of Saudi Arabia, the next biggest spender, according to the report published Thursday by the panel’s Democratic minority. It argued that the foreign payments identified are “likely only a small fraction” of the true total because of incomplete disclosures.
The report, underpinned by documents provided to House investigators by the accounting firm Mazars USA, offers a fuller picture of how Trump’s businesses benefited during his presidency as foreign officials may have tried to curry favor with Trump. Democrats will likely raise such questions again if he wins another term in November.
The Democratic minority released its findings as their House GOP counterparts are pursuing an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, focused on whether he benefited from the overseas business dealings of his son Hunter and others in his family. The Bidens have denied any wrongdoing, and Democrats have accused Republicans of hypocrisy given Trump’s extensive foreign business efforts.
Hundreds of pages of expenses seen by the Journal include at least $210,000 in real estate and lodging fees by Saudi Arabia in 2018, the same year Trump publicly doubted U.S. intelligence assessments that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. (The Democrats’ report estimated Saudi Arabia spent at least $615,000 at Trump properties over the course of his presidency.)
Newly disclosed receipts also show that Hainan Airlines Holding, which then had connections to China’s leadership, incurred $195,662 in charges at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas during a 14-month period beginning days before Trump was elected in 2016.
Malaysia paid for a $10,000-per-night suite in Trump’s Washington hotel in September 2017 for then-Prime Minister Najib Razak while he was under a U.S. investigation for his role in a multibillion-dollar corruption scandal that ultimately helped topple his government. Malaysia’s spending caused a 70% jump in average nightly room revenue at Trump’s Washington hotel compared with other nights that month, the report said.
And a few months earlier, a Saudi delegation paid $2,000 for coffee table flowers and towers of cookies at the same hotel.
The Democrats’ report also estimated expenses from publicly available documents, such as Securities and Exchange Commission filings indicating that Chinese state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China likely paid more than $5 million in lease expenses at Trump properties while Trump was in office.
The governments of Qatar, Kuwait and India rounded out the list of top five spenders, the report found, splashing out more than $1 million combined.
“No president has ever come close” to receiving as many gifts from foreign governments as Trump has, said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the oversight panel’s top Democrat, on Thursday. He said the Constitution’s central command is that the president “serves the American people, not foreign governments that want to pay him off.”
A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization said in a statement that foreign profits from patronage at its properties while Trump was president were voluntarily donated in full to the U.S. Treasury and that the company can’t “stop someone from booking through third parties.”
She added that ICBC, whose lease payments contributed the majority of China’s total payments, signed a 20-year office lease many years before Trump took office. She dismissed the Democratic investigators as “desperate to save face for Hunter Biden.”
A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said the Chinese government “requires Chinese companies to operate overseas in accordance with local laws and regulations.”
Representatives for the Saudi and Malaysian embassies, as well as for Mazars USA, didn’t immediately respond to the Journal’s inquiries.
The findings stem from years of litigation into whether Trump ran afoul of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which prevents officeholders from accepting anything of value from foreign states without the permission of Congress. A 2022 agreement allowed the Oversight Committee to view a pared-down set of documents.
But after Democrats lost control of the chamber in 2023, they said the panel’s new chairman, Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), effectively shut down the flow of documents from Mazars. As such, there could be countries that spent heavily but for whom receipts weren’t provided, and the spending of countries featured in the report may not be fully captured.
It isn’t clear if China’s expenditures at Trump properties affected the administration’s policies. The report criticizes Trump for not taking action against top spender ICBC despite Justice Department allegations that it and other Chinese banks provided accounts to a company that had allegedly conspired to evade sanctions against North Korea. But no administration has so far been willing to cut off a major Chinese bank from the financial system over concerns of potential unintended turmoil, including in Western markets. In the case of another large spender, China’s Hainan Airlines, both the U.S. and Chinese governments ended up taking regulatory action against its parent at the time, HNA Group.
Regardless, the report’s authors argued that the Constitution’s emoluments prohibition applies to any business transaction “through which a foreign government could subtly curry favor and ingratiate itself.”
Democratic staffers also said the ability of Trump family businesses to secure trademarks in China “improved markedly and rapidly after Trump entered office,” alleging Trump improperly failed to disclose many of these trademarks during his presidency.
The report also estimated that a unit of CEFC China Energy paid at least $180,628 to Trump World Tower during Trump’s presidency, citing Mazars and court records. Entities tied to CEFC, which has since collapsed, also paid more than $4.7 million to Hunter Biden’s Washington law firm starting in August 2017, according to records published earlier by congressional Republicans. Democratic investigators said the CEFC unit’s payments to Trump created potential conflicts of interest, but they didn’t classify them as emoluments paid by the Chinese state due to what they described as CEFC’s convoluted ownership.
Trump’s conflicts have also drawn interest beyond federal lawmakers, including a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia. It argued that Trump’s D.C. hotel enjoyed an unfair advantage over competing businesses in the region because foreign-government entities sought to use Trump-owned properties to ingratiate themselves with the new administration.
The Supreme Court dismissed the case days after Biden’s 2021 inauguration, saying it was moot because Trump was no longer president.
Write to Jack Gillum at jack.gillum@wsj.com and Kate O’Keeffe at kathryn.okeeffe@wsj.com
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