‘Brazen Conflict of Interest’: Trump Reportedly Held Oval Office Meeting to Forge Merger Involving Saudi Business Partner

Alex Brandon via AP

President Donald Trump held an Oval Office meeting just weeks into his second term in which the topic of conversation was helping a Saudi business partner, The New York Times reported Monday.

According to reporters Maggie Haberman and Eric Lipton, the meeting took place in early February and the president sought to overcome challenges to a merger between the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf, a Trump family business partner. Haberman and Lipton reported:

The Oval Office meeting convened by President Trump brought together the most important leaders in the world of professional golf: Jay Monahan, the top executive at the PGA Tour, and, via telephone, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of the Saudi Arabia-backed league known as LIV Golf. The stated goal was to figure out a way to eliminate roadblocks preventing the planned merger between the rival two groups.

But the gathering earlier this month said something even more important about the Trump administration itself. Mr. Trump was not simply using the power of his office to forge an agreement — something that presidents have done for centuries. In this case, Mr. Trump was pushing a merger that relates to his own family’s financial interests.

The Trump family is a LIV Golf business partner. The family has repeatedly hosted LIV tournaments at its golf venues, including one planned in April at the Trump National Doral in Miami for the fourth year in a row.
In other words, according to half a dozen former Justice Department prosecutors and government ethics lawyers, Mr. Trump’s participation in this discussion was a brazen conflict of interest — one of a series that have played out over the past few weeks, with a frequency unlike any presidency in modern times, even in the first Trump term.

Haberman and Lipton noted that presidents are immune from conflict of interest laws where other government officials are not.

They concluded that the president was demonstrating a “confidence that the lines dividing various Trump interests, and his desire to reward friends and punish perceived enemies, won’t trigger congressional oversight in a political ecosystem that he helped change.”

Trump previously vowed not to engage in any business deals with potential conflict of interest concerns while in office.

Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who is cutting government jobs and freezing funding at numerous federal agencies on behalf of Trump, made a similar pledge last week.

Musk’s companies have taken in billions of dollars from federal contracts in recent years, and Tesla could soon be awarded a $400 million State Department contract for a so-called “armored Tesla.”