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Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, usually, public corruption happens in secret. The politicians that do it know it is wrong to accept money in exchange for favorable government treatment, and so they hide it until they are found out.

A textbook example would be Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, who in the 1990s was quietly taking bribes from businessmen who wanted to get licenses for riverboat casinos.

In the late 1990s, Edwards was convicted of the crimes of extortion, racketeering, and money laundering. The way in which he was doing it was like out of a movie. In one instance, a businessman handed the Governor a suitcase full of $100 bills, totaling $400,000--all in order to get a 6-to-0 commission ruling in favor of his casino. Eventually, as with most all corrupt officials who are taking money privately, Edwards was discovered, he was disgraced, and he went to jail.

As we speak, our President Donald Trump is going to the Middle East on a public corruption tour. He is no less corrupt than Edwin Edwards of Louisiana. In fact, he is way more corrupt. Edwin Edwards took $400,000. Well, in the Middle East, Donald Trump will cement deals totaling in the billions in exchange for favorable treatment by the U.S. Federal Government for these Gulf countries.

The key difference is that Donald Trump isn't hiding it like other corrupt officials are. He is not ashamed. He is not doing it in secret. His corruption is wildly public, and his hope is that by doing it publicly, he can con the American people into thinking that it is not corruption because he is not hiding it. But what he is doing, in reality, is no different than any other corrupt public official who does it in private other than the fact that Trump's corruption, his foreign policy corruption, is just so much bigger in scope and the impact it has on the American people than anything a corrupt mayor or a corrupt Governor may have done.

Trump's first major foreign trip--and he just landed--is to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE--not because these are our most important allies in the world, not because these are the most important countries in the world, not because he is going there to talk about making the Middle East more safe and more secure--no. His first trip is to these three countries because these are the three countries that have agreed to pay Donald Trump money. Donald Trump is going to collect tribute, and it is all just out in the open.

Frankly, it was pretty easy to see this coming.

Recent former Presidents, Republicans and Democrats, have always very seriously and studiously avoided even the appearance of a conflict of interest. President Bush placed his assets into a qualified blind trust where investment decisions were made without his knowledge or input. Both Biden and Obama divested all of their assets except for cash and mutual funds. They didn't enter into any new business ventures while in the White House.

In contrast, Trump has refused to abide by these standard ethics rules. His family runs his business, but nobody honestly believes that the kids are really in charge. President Trump is still calling the shots. His interests are not in a blind trust. He has made no pledge that he won't do new deals, even with foreign entities, while he is in office. In fact, he is doing deals seemingly every single week. He is open for business, and every foreign government knows it. In fact, it appears that right now, the Gulf States are trying to outdo each other to up the price of buying an American President. And because Trump is greedy and he is insecure, he wants to fit in with the billionaire class, he is traveling the region with his hat out for further solicitations.

So let's ask: What is the going rate right now for a Gulf country to buy access to Donald Trump, to get favorable treatment from the Federal Government?

For Qatar, we recently found out it is a $400 million luxury plane. This plane has been opulently configured for royal use. It is not a gift to the U.S. Government; it is a personal gift to the President. The terms of the arrangement apparently include a stipulation that after Trump leaves office, it will be transferred to Trump, to his Presidential library, which means Trump gets the so-called floating palace for himself.

This is outrageous. We have never seen anything like this before in American history--a foreign government gifting a $400 million luxury plane to the President of the United States.

This is spelled out as blatantly unconstitutional by our Founding Fathers. They wrote into the Constitution a specific clause called the emoluments clause, which prohibits Federal officeholders from accepting gifts from any King, Prince, or foreign state without the consent of Congress. Like, how much clearer could it be? It is unconstitutional. It is illegal. The Founding Fathers knew it was evil to have Members of Congress or the President of the United States accepting expensive gifts from a foreign nation that, in exchange, wants favors from the U.S. Government. Donald Trump's acceptance of the luxury plane from a foreign monarch is basically the corruption that our Founding Fathers were seeking to prevent.

But that is not all he is getting from Qatar. The Trump Organization recently signed a $5.5 billion golf course and real estate deal with DarGlobal and Qatari Diar, a firm established by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund--$5.5 billion while Trump is in office.

It would have been unthinkable for any previous President to enter into a $5.5 billion business deal with anybody--never mind a foreign government--while they are in office, and it still should be unthinkable.

Now, Qatar is a U.S. ally. It is a very important ally. But they are a complicated country. They have their own interests, some of which don't overlap with ours. A foreign government like Qatar should not have a $5 billion chit hanging over the head of a sitting U.S. President, and they should not be gifting him a $400 million plane. That should kind of go without saying.

For Saudi Arabia, the price is also in the billions. Soon after leaving the White House in Trump's first term, his son-in-law Jared Kushner created a private equity firm and got a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia. The board of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund questioned whether this was smart, to invest that much money in a totally unproven fund, but the Saudi Crown Prince himself overruled the board, undoubtedly seeing the political advantage of investing directly with the Trump family.

But this was only the beginning. The Trump family has put things into overdrive during the second term. Within his first 3 weeks of office, Trump convened a meeting at the White House with the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund--not to discuss matters of state, but to negotiate a deal between the PGA and the Saudi-backed LIV golf tour. Do you want to know why? To try to bring PGA tournaments back to Trump golf courses. Trump convened a meeting in the White House with the Saudis in order to enrich himself.

In addition to the $5 billion Qatar real estate deal, the Trump organization is also partnering with a Saudi firm on a $1 billion Trump-branded hotel and tower in Dubai. The property's website--this is, like, unbelievable. The property's website--this is a Trump- financed property, along with a Saudi investment fund--offers free 10- year ``golden visas'' to the United States, hinting at the opportunity for investors in Trump's property to buy residency in the United States and a pathway to citizenship. For the UAE, the price is somewhere north of $2 billion. Last week, Eric Trump and World Liberty Financial cofounder Zach Witkoff spoke at a conference in Dubai on crypto called TOKEN2049.

As an aside here, it is just so fantastic and bone-chilling how transparent these guys are in their use of public positions to enrich themselves.

I am going to tell the story of Trump's stablecoin and the corruption with the Emirates. Let's just pause for a second and consider the fact that the Trump family could have partnered with anybody in the world on their new crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. But of all the people in the world to partner with on this new crypto venture, they chose the son of Trump's Middle East envoy--Trump's Middle East envoy, the guy who is making all decisions on U.S. policy in the Middle East-- just to make it crystal clear to the Gulf countries that when they deal with World Liberty Financial, Trump's crypto venture, that they are dealing directly with the people responsible for making the U.S. policy in the Middle East.

It is just stunning. Literally, the sons of the President and the sons of the Middle East envoy are running a crypto venture and then going directly into the Middle East in order to find their first investment. And guess what? Miracle--they found it.

MGX, an investment firm backed by the Emirati Government, at this conference announced that they had looked at all the crypto companies in the world that they could partner with to invest $2 billion in the crypto exchange finance, and they selected--wait for it, drum roll--the company run by the sons of the President of the United States and the U.S. Middle East envoy--$2 billion.

World Liberty's role in this transaction is not that complicated. It is kind of similar to a bank. MGX, this Emirati firm, deposits $2 billion with the firm and, in return, receives the stablecoin to be used on these crypto exchanges. The firm holds onto these dollars, invests them, and keeps the profits for themselves. So the Trump- Witkoff company just gets, basically, a gift of capital. And if they just use that $2 billion to invest in Treasury bonds, it would profit around $85 million a year from these investments alone. And the money goes directly to Trump--just directly to Trump. It is literally not complicated--Emirates, World Liberty Financial, Donald Trump.

This isn't 1990s Louisiana. Nobody is hiding it. On World Liberty's website, they say an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump owns 60 percent of the equity in the company. Because of this deal, Trump and Witkoff can further capitalize because Trump's stablecoin just became the fifth most valuable stablecoin in the world because of the Emirati investment.

If the plane and the real estate deals and the private equity fund investment and the stablecoin weren't enough for you, Trump has found one last way for Gulf money to flow seamlessly into his pocket. It is called the Trump meme coin. What is the business model here? Trump gets a huge payment whenever he releases a batch of these meme coins, which, by the way, have no underlying value other than just the demands people have for Trump's coin. And each time a Trump coin is bought or sold, a small fee is routed directly to the company owned by Trump. According to one analysis, nearly $325 million in fees have been accrued since the coin was launched in January. In just 3 months, 4 months, 4\1/2\ half months--$325 million worth of fees.

Trump hides the buyers of the coin. In this way, the meme coin is kind of a little like the Louisiana corruption. But we know that the majority of the buyers aren't Americans who want to help Trump make this Nation great again. The majority of the buyers of Trump coin are superrich foreigners--princes, oligarchs, authoritarians--who are buying the coin in order to get in good with Trump or to get something in exchange.

One great thing about buying the coin is that you get access to Trump in the White House. Again, they are not hiding this. Two weeks ago, Trump announced he would host a private dinner at the White House with seats reserved exclusively for the top 220 Trump coin holders. In 2 days since the announcement, Trump's company made $900,000 in fees because everybody--mostly foreigners, many of them probably in the Gulf--were buying up the coin as quickly as they could in order to get one of these seats.

If a mayor of a small town was selling meetings at city hall for $1,000, he would be run out of town on a rail. But that is exactly what Donald Trump is doing in the Middle East and all over the world as foreign buyers line up to buy the meme coin, guaranteed private access to Donald Trump at the White House.

You cannot make this up. The obvious question for the average American is, OK, what does this mean for me? Like, somebody living in New Britain, CT, might think it is kind of gross that Trump is lining his pockets as President, but they want to know, how does this actually affect me?

Well, the most simple way to think about this is, if the guy you elected to protect us and make our lives better is spending most of his time alternating between playing golf and cutting deals for himself, he is not protecting you. He is not spending any time trying to lower costs or defeat our enemies. Corruption can be a full-time job for Donald Trump, and that is a pretty lousy deal for the American people.

More importantly, when our foreign policy is for sale, we are less safe.

Let me give you an example relative to the trip that Donald Trump is on right now. These countries aren't padding Donald Trump's pockets because they like him. They are paying him in order to get things from the Federal Government--from the U.S. Government--without having to make any actual policy concessions that would benefit the U.S. people.

Before anybody could begin to process the brazen corruption of the UAE-Trump-Witkoff crypto deal, reports very quickly emerged that the Trump administration was considering changing regulations to make it easier for the country of UAE to purchase highly advanced semiconductors from U.S. manufacturers. This was a huge priority of the Emirates. But the restrictions are on the UAE for a reason. The UAE has a very troubling and very close security relationship with China. And so the reason why we didn't allow U.S. companies to sell semiconductors directly to the UAE is because we believe it would very easily become a conduit to China getting their hands on these advanced semiconductors and being able to leapfrog the United States in the business of advanced AI.

But all of a sudden, once the cash payment to Trump through the crypto venture was announced, Trump signaled he was willing to throw our security concerns out the window and transfer this sensitive technology to the UAE, even though it is likely China will get their hands on this technology, allowing China to put themselves in a position to leapfrog us in the race for advanced AI. That would be a disaster for the American people. But that is what is happening. We might hand AI leadership to China because that is the price of Trump getting paid. As long as he gets paid, he doesn't seem to care about the impact on regular Americans.

The White House is open for business and the Trump family is proudly advertising to the world where to send the check. They aren't trying to hide it--a $400 million luxury plane gifted to the President of the United States right as he is going over to negotiate potentially sensitive security arrangements with the Gulf countries.

Every American, every Republican, every supposed national security advocate in the Senate should be outraged by this. We could look the other way, or we could show together, Republicans and Democrats, to stand up for this country and do something about it.

I have joined with Senators Schatz and Coons and Booker to introduce a resolution condemning the acceptance of the plane. It is a blatant violation of the Emoluments Clause. We could stand together as a Senate to vote for that resolution.

I introduced legislation to make it illegal for Presidents or Members of Congress and their family members to profit off crypto coins while they hold Federal office. We could join together in that effort.

I will personally seek to block any arms sale that is announced as part of this trip with a country that is personally investing in Donald Trump and his family. I will force a full Senate debate and a vote on these sales.

Foreign leaders need to know that there will be a price for participating in the corruption of the American Presidency. This level of corruption is so gross that even Trump's most hardened MAGA sycophants are turning against him. I didn't think I would see the day, but people like Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer who fawn over Trump, can't believe he is so crass as to think it is OK to accept planes as a gift in exchange for U.S. national security concessions.

This isn't ``America First.'' This is not what he promised the American people. This is Trump first. He is willing to put our Nation's security at risk, take unconstitutional bribes, just so he can fly himself and his Mar-a-Lago golf buddies around the world in gold-plated luxury planes gifted to him by foreign governments--all while at the same time he tells Americans they should be OK buying fewer school supplies for their kids or fewer birthday presents for their grandchildren because he is driving prices up for nonbillionaires in this country--all while at the same time he is kicking 13 million people off of their healthcare.

Trump lines his pockets, he corrupts our foreign policy to enrich himself, while driving up prices and stealing healthcare from average Americans. It is a national security disaster, and it is a moral abomination.

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