DOJ: Trump can accept payments from foreign governments

[Yo_Mama]

47. I don't think so, based on two prongs.

First, the Emoluments Clause:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Note that this applies to all persons holding federal office, including Congress or any federal officeholder. Not just the president. The Clinton family received far more financial benefit from foreign governments through the Clinton Foundation than Trump is doing.

First, consider history:
1) All presidents in recent memory, and certainly several of the original generation, were businessmen, or held a lot of stock in companies. At the time of the passage of the Constitution, most of the Congress were businessmen. In their capacity as businessmen, and as an active governmental policy in the early history of the US, they were trying to develop industry and exports. Cotton, lumber, anything we could ship. It's a certainty that the plantation owners were exporting and receiving payments, to some degree, from foreign governments. Thus, they all, in one way or another, were receiving payments from foreign governments. You think IBM, CISCO, Microsoft, etc don't receive payments from foreign governments. You think Verizon and the utility companies don't receive payments from foreign governments? You think it is illegal for a US office holder to own stock in those companies?

Second, consider possibility:
2) Many Congressional Senators & Representatives receive payments from foreign governments in theoretically arms-length transactions. They publish books. They own houses. They have shares in companies. Many of them are involved in real estate, some in foreign holdings of real estate. This is a standard impossible to impose.

What's banned by the Emoluments clause cannot be a standard commercial transaction.

Finally, consider nine Supreme Court justices considering this matter. They are certainly not going to try to interpret this standard in a way that makes them all potentially subject to such charges.