President Donald Trump’s sons are profiting off of their father’s connections, including in a previously-undisclosed deal over a lucrative metal.
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“Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history,” wrote The New York Times’ Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton on Sunday. The report covered how Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump availed themselves of a meeting between Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in September to grant a little-known American company called Kaz Resources access to their tungsten mines.
Prior to that meeting, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for up to $1.6 billion in federal financing for Kaz Resources to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan. Dominari Securities, which is partly owned by the Trump sons, agreed to take a 20 percent stake in the tungsten projects.
“Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity,” Sonne and Lipton wrote. “Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.”
They added, “The Kazakh deal was ultimately signed on Nov. 6, six days after the investment involving the Trump sons and their partners, which was not publicly disclosed at the time. The arrangement is hardly an outlier. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project, according to federal filings examined by The New York Times.”
This is not the only occasion when the Trump family has come under scrutiny for profiting from the White House, as has Trump himself. Earlier this month the American Economic Liberties Project and Groundwork Collaborative released a joint report called “The Price of Corruption: How Trump’s Pay-to-Play Administration is Driving Up Costs for Working Families,” which described how the Trumps’ alleged corruption has literally cost ordinary Americans a lot of money.
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“When Trump rolled out TrumpRX earlier this year, the administration claimed it was a way for Americans to access more affordable prescription drugs,” the report pointed out. “Instead, the platform fails to disclose information about less expensive generic alternatives and, in some instances, charges consumers more for products that are available for less elsewhere.”
It added that TrumpRx “serves as free advertisement for Big Pharma and may be lining the pockets of the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is on the board of prescription drug platform BlinkRX, which stands to benefit from the administration’s promotion of direct-to-patient medicine sales.”
It also observed that Trump’s tariffs have raised the cost of imported goods for consumers while also enriching Trump himself, citing as one example when he reduced Swiss tariffs “just a few days after Swiss business leaders presented him with a personalized gold bar worth more than $130,000 and a Rolex desk clock.” Conversely, when Trump’s fellow right-winger, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, faced legal consequences for plotting a coup to illegally stay in power after losing an election to current President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, Trump used tariffs to retaliate.
“Americans paid the price for Trump’s international allies breaking the law,” the report pointed out, “as coffee imported from Brazil surged to a 40% increase in price.”
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