Bulwark Takes - This Is the Most Obvious Corruption Ever (w/ Sen. Brian Schatz)

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Sam Stein is joined by Senator Brian Schatz to break down the $400 million “gift” from Qatar to Donald Trump, raising serious constitutional and ethical red flags. They discuss how Democrats (and even some Republicans) are condemning it, and how this kind of blatant grift fits into the larger pattern of Trump-era corruption.

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Fierce. This has been your Wayfair style tip to keep those interiors superior. Hey guys, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at The Bulwark, and I'm joined by Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who is here to talk about all the times he's been bribed with a $400 million plane and other bribes he may have been asked to accept during his time in office. But in all seriousness, we're going to talk about the plane from Qatar, and we're going to get into that and what Democrats may or may not be able to do about it. All right. So, Senator, obviously, this is a big deal. We have this proposed gift, although I guess there are reports that the plane

is already in Texas. So I'm not sure what we know about the status of the plane. Maybe you can eliminate that. You have read a resolution to condemn it. This is the most blatant, obvious, ridiculous, gross corruption that I've ever seen in my entire life. You don't have to be. I'm not a lawyer. You don't have to be all fancy pants to understand how ridiculous it is that a foreign government is going to say, hey, we'll take care of Air Force One for you.

Air Force One is a symbol of the United States, where Air Force One is one of the most recognizing symbols of the office of the presidency, and so on and so forth. Therefore, be it resolved that we shouldn't do this. That seems pretty straightforward. But I just want to talk sort of about the larger picture here, which is it's fairly open corruption. And we're being accused of being suckers for not seeing the virtue of accepting this plane. People who view that luxury jet as a personal gift to you, why not leave it behind? You're ABC fake news, right? Why not? Only ABC.

Well, a few of you would. Let me tell you, you should be embarrassed asking that question. They're giving us a free jet. I could say, no, no, no, don't give us. I want to pay you a billion or 400 million or whatever it is. Or I could say, thank you very much. Is there a situation in which you think the plane could be accepted if it maybe wasn't for Trump's library use after the fact? Or is this just plain don't do it?

It's awful. It's bad. Not just bad optics, but it's bad politics. Yeah, it's corrupt. There are no circumstances under which a $400 million gift of any kind for any president from any foreign entity is appropriate. So, like, that should be the beginning and the end of the conversation. Right. More to the point.

Yeah. They are trying to lawyer around it by saying a really specific thing, which is, this is not actually a gift to the president. It's a gift to the United States air force. And after that, it'll be remitted to a nonprofit. Oh,

what nonprofit is that? It's the Trump foundation. And so this is an aircraft that he will be able to ride, um, uh, probably for the rest of his life paid for by the country of Qatar. He says, he says, to be clear, he'll never ride it in his post-presidency. It's going to be in the, the library, which we know he cares deeply about, uh, like Ronald Reagan has an air force one in his library. Sure. Um, anyway, and you know, I feel like we're getting caught up in the details here. Like, we don't take a $400 million thing of any kind.

It doesn't matter if it's an aircraft. And I, like, I actually think part of the problem that we Democrats have is, like, we want to make new arguments. We want to make clever arguments. So some of the new and clever arguments are, and they're true, right, are that the Air Force One is a mobile situation room. It is a mobile, oval office. It is also a press briefing room. And none of those things should be built and paid for by a foreign entity. And it would probably cost some number of hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars, to basically dismantle an aircraft bolt by bolt, make sure there are no transistors or bugs or anything in there, and then reconstitute it.

But again, we're missing the damn point. It's not that this bribe shouldn't be taken because it's impracticable. This bribe shouldn't be taken because it would be a big hassle or a security concern. Nobody should take a $400 million item from a foreign country. And that's the end of the conversation. Right. And it seems like they didn't, when I originally read the ABC News story about this, what struck me was there was never a line where it was like the Trump administration considered that maybe they should just refuse.

Like it was all like, can we do this? Can we make sure there's a legal rationale for doing this? And if we can, then of course we would accept it. There was no one who said, you know what, maybe this isn't actually the right thing to do. To get a little bit like into the, you know, not weeds, but the speculative business here. Are you surprised at all that it actually was publicized? No, because I actually think one of the things we need to understand is how much impunity this president is operating with. Right. Does think you are. I mean, the thing he said was I forgot which old golfer he quoted,

but it was like Sam Snead. You know, there was an old golfer named Sam Snead. Did you ever hear he won 82 tournaments? He was a great golfer. And he had a motto. When they give you a putt, you say, thank you very much. You pick up your ball and you walk to the next hole. A lot of people are stupid. They say, no, no, I insist on putting it. Then they putt it and they miss it. And their partner gets angry at them. You know what?

Remember that. Sam Snead. Sam Snead. Yeah. Before my time. But, you know, when someone gives you a gimme, you take it. Otherwise, you're kind of a sucker. And his view is if someone gives you a free thing, what are you, a sucker?

Right. And he literally, I think, literally does not understand why it would be improper to take a free thing from a foreign country. And so their grift and their graft is so complete, so sort of totalizing, but they literally, when they go to the Middle East for business deals, like the Washington Post articles, like the headline was like, the focus of the Middle East trip is business. And that is, you know, turning an absolutely corrupt enterprise into a kind of euphemistic focus on, you know, free market opportunities for Americans, not for Americans. It's for him and his cronies. And I do think if we were in any other country, or I should say, if this were happening in any other country, that we Americans would be able to, on a bipartisan basis, go like,

well, that's corrupt. That is the kind of dictator who just goes around, enriches himself, and impoverishes everyone else. We recognize that when it's not our leader. When it's our leader, only 50-some-odd percent of the people recognize, like, dude is ripping you off. I think it's more than 50%. I think there are plenty of Republicans who are like, I mean, I guess maybe my bar is so low, but I was a little bit intrigued, let's say, by some of your colleagues yesterday saying, on the Republican side, saying he shouldn't do this. Like Ted Cruz. The plane poses significant espionage and surveillance problems. So we'll see how this

issue plays out. But I certainly have concerns. And Ron Johnson, we're both like, he should. Now, yes, Tommy Tuberville was like, go get him. Freeze good. You know, we, we don't have a lot of money right now to buy things like that. We've got two ordered. I don't know the legalities of it. If it's legal for him to accept that gift and be able to fly on that for the next four years or three and a half years. I think it's great. But you know, the other ones were like, this is not a, you shouldn't,

just don't do it. Like it's not. And evenon johnson's like i'm uncomfortable with this so i actually disagree i think it's a little bit more than 50 well you know from your lips to god's ears i have just been disappointed um uh year over year over year with these guys they will you know their their moment of courage is to go like i don't know about. And then if he goes through with it, they'll be like, well, it turns out Pam Bondi had a letter. Yeah. Who used to lobby for Qatar has, yes. I will say Mike Johnson, speaker of the house, was, has been asked about this for, for a day and a half or so today he was quoted as saying, it's not my lane. My understanding is it's not a personal gift to the president. It's a gift to the United States and other nations give us gifts all the time. But I'm going to leave it to the administration. They know much more about the details of that. OK, I'm just it's not my lane.

And in fact, I do think it is his lane. That's right. I mean, look, it's all of our lane. If you're an elected official or if you're an American, it is in everyone's collective interest to do something about an American president accepting a $400 million. Well, what can you do besides letters of condemnation? Well, I mean, now this is a little bit in the weeds, but this is a foreign emolument. This is a consideration. And remember, the emoluments clause doesn't just say you can't take a foreign bribe. It says you can't have any foreign entanglements of any financial nature. You can't have deals with foreign countries, even if they are at sort of arm's length market value. All of those deals are subject to approval by the United States Congress. So I know Dick Blumenthal in the first Trump term tried to basically say, look, these things are all emoluments, which is to say inducements or in some instances bribes.

And they are subject to congressional approval or disapproval. I was a co-signer on that lawsuit. It got kicked for standing, which I think is preposterous because if the Congress who has this authority to approve or disapprove of an emolument is not in a position to approve or disapprove because it's never – You're being deprived of the execution of your own laws. So, yes, you should not stand there. disapprove of an emolument is not in a position to approve or disapprove because it's never being deprived of the execution of your own laws so yes so we're gonna we i think we're i'm not the lawyer here but there is going to be another swing at this thing because this is quite clearly the you're saying you're saying that because people your colleagues have talked about taking another swing or you're just speculating here no i've talked to Dick Blumenthal and he's very anxious to re-litigate this because at a minimum, Congress should ratify

this. And look, they've got the votes in the Congress to ratify the gift, right? And that is what happens when there's a foreign country that wants to give the United States of America something, that it gets submitted to Congress as an emolument. And if it's kind of on the level and looks to be in the public interest, we can all vote for it. That's fine. Well, Chuck Schumer, that's interesting that Senator Blumenthal is going to do that and definitely will follow up with him on that. Senator Schumer is putting a hold on DOJ nominees until, I guess, they refuse the gift. I am announcing a hold on all DOJ political nominees until we get more answers. It's tough to say how effective that would be because I don't know how many nominees they're putting forward at this point in time. But essentially, you know, they

wouldn't be able to fast track anyone that they want to put forward. And you've done that similarly for, I believe, for some State Department nominees, totally different issue. But, you know, it does seem like there's few levers, but are there any ones that you feel like could additionally be pulled or is that it? There is one lever that Tim Kaine pulled on the El Salvador question, and we basically says that any member can force a report on the human potential human rights violations of any country that with which we have a security arrangement. And so the cool thing about that is it's privileged, which means that you don't have to be in the majority to force a vote. So it takes 14 days. But after you file it, we must vote. And so we're voting to basically ask for the State Department to do an analysis of whether El Salvador is in compliance with our federal human rights expectations.

We can do the same thing for Qatar or any other country. So one of the things that's happening in this era is that everyone is kind of scrubbing all the Senate rules. Who knew this one existed? Yeah. And I've got a bunch of Senate experts on my staff that are constantly doing this. But Tim found this one as he did emergency declaration that is causing prices to go up via the tariffs. And so increasingly, you're going to see Senate Democrats force votes in ways that are kind of unusual because the assumption is the majority leader controls when we vote and what we vote on. That is true 90% of the time, but we're going to live in that 10% of the time where we're going to make sure that they are on the record on the question of El Salvador or Qatar or tariffs.

And that's the key. It's not that you expect Marco Rubio or the State Department to produce a very sort of overboard and over the top and clear and objective analysis. Like they're going to, they won't do that, but you do put them on the record by forcing that vote. All right. Last question. And I don't want, I'm not trying to do this to sound cheeky about it because this is like sort of an honest debate that's happening, which is between the gifted plane and the crypto Trump meme coin dinner, which one is worse? I think the, I mean, I don't know by dollar amount how corrupt the meme coin is in terms of whether it exceeds the 400 million. I think it probably does. And the meme coin, like, you know, you kind of have to understand how crypto works.

The meme coin is not Bitcoin, right? It's not real currency or even cryptocurrency. It is the equivalent of opening up a Swiss bank account and saying, hey, if you'd like to just remunerate me for funsies, you can. So I think that's pretty squarely corrupt. I will say, because, you know, politics has to do with communications. The plane itself is easier to remember. It is easier to understand. To think about Air Force One sort of sponsored by Qatar is a little easier to understand than a meme coin or a sort of crypto scam. They're both really gross and egregious. I think the airplane is a little easier for people to kind of wrap their minds around. I would agree with that. Although the

meme coin thing is crazy. All right, Senator Brian Schatz, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.