ON POLITICS

Watchdog group files lawsuit over foreign payments to Trump businesses

Fredreka Schouten

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – A liberal watchdog group filed a lawsuit Monday, contending that President Trump is violating the Constitution by continuing to accept payments from foreign governments at the businesses operated by his family.

“It was our hope that President Trump would take the necessary steps to avoid violating the Constitution before he took office,” said Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington or CREW. “He did not. His constitutional violations are immediate and serious, so we were forced to take legal action.”

Asked about the lawsuit Monday, Trump said it was "without merit."

At the heart of the suit: The foreign "Emoluments Clause” of the Constitution, which bans payments or gifts from foreign governments to the president without congressional approval.

Some 30.6 million people watched Donald Trump's Inauguration on Friday.

Earlier this month, Trump and his lawyer Sheri Dillon said he was surrendering management of the company to his two adult sons, Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump, and a longtime Trump Organization executive. They plan to operate the businesses through a trust and will add an ethics adviser to review deals.

Trump, however, still retains ownership of his businesses.

At a new conference announcing Trump's business plan, Dillon argued that the emoluments clause doesn't apply to fair market value transactions for goods and services, such as a paying for a hotel room.

Trump won't drop ownership of business

The lawsuit, filed in New York, seeks to stop Trump from taking payments from foreign governments. CREW’s lawyers in the case include prominent constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe, along with Norman Eisen and Richard Painter, who served as top White House ethics lawyers for President Obama and President George W. Bush, respectively.

Eisen and Painter hold leadership roles at CREW, which had until recently been overseen by David Brock, a top supporter of Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic rival for the presidency. Several other constitutional scholars are part of the CREW lawsuit, including Erwin Chemerinsky, who is dean of University of California's Irvine School of Law.

"There is no doubt that President Trump has been violating the Constitution since he took the oath of office," Chemerinsky said in a statement. "This lawsuit simply asks the federal court to enforce the Constitution and reaffirm that no person, not even the President, is above the law.”

Eric Trump, in an interview with The New York Times, called the lawsuit “harassment for political gain.”

The scope of emoluments clause has not been fully tested in court. It's not clear whether a federal judge will agree that an outside watchdog group has any legal standing to sue Trump over constitutional issues. In the lawsuit, CREW officials argue that they have endured harm because they have had to shift resources to investigate and respond to media inquiries about Trump's activities, limiting their ability to pursue other parts of their mission.

A slew of liberal groups are looking for ways to challenge Trump on potential conflicts of interest.

On Friday, for instance, the American Civil Liberties Union announced it had filed Freedom of Information Act requests for communications between Trump’s presidential team and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the Office of Government Ethics and the General Services Administration. The General Services Administration oversees the lease Trump’s company holds on the federal building that houses the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington.

Other groups have talked openly of trying to persuade a business competitor — such as a rival hotelier who has lost foreign embassy clients to Trump's hotel — to take legal action.

Contributing: David Jackson