CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin on Monday evening ripped President Donald Trump for his “unprecedented” grifting after Trump floated the idea of holding next year’s G-7 Summit at his Doral Club in Florida.
“The president has been grifting off of the presidency from the day he took office,” Toobin claimed. “I mean, think about all of the thousands of dollars that are spent at Trump Tower in New York, at the resort in New Jersey, at Mar-a-Lago, all of which he owns. And the federal government, all the service agents, all the press that go down there have to spend money at his resorts. So his attempt to bring a much bigger convention, in effect, to his struggling Doral resort is of a piece with how he’s handled the presidency.”
Toobin then said it is “characteristic” that the “scope of the Emoluments Clause” is not really known, adding that the “Emoluments Clause was put in by the framers because they didn’t want the original American elected officials to be tempted by the money from old Europe in the 18th century.”
“I mean, there has never been a president where this has been a problem before,” he said.
CNN’s national security and legal analyst Susan Hennessey added that the “the original sin of this administration was the president’s failure to divest from his personal business.”
“Ever since he made that decision and the American public decided to let him get away that, Congress decided to let him get away with this astonishing thing, President Trump has been using the powers of his office to line his own pocketbooks and that of his family and his cronies,” she claimed.