D.C., Maryland sue Trump over foreign business dealings

The attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia filed a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump on Monday, accusing him of violating provisions of the Constitution intended to protect against corruption and seeking to uncover the tax returns that the president has thus far been unwilling to release.

The suit focuses on the president’s continued ownership of his family’s business empire, control of which Trump said he handed over to his two adult sons. But far from the blind-trust standard adopted by past presidents, Trump continues to receive some information about the Trump organization, including profit reports, from his sons.


The lawsuit, brought by D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine and Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, both Democrats, was filed Monday morning in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The case focuses primarily on allegations that Trump’s business dealings violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which prohibits payments to U.S. officials from foreign government sources.

“The suit alleges that President Trump is flagrantly violating the Constitution,” Racine said at a news conference in Washington on Monday afternoon. “Never in the history of this country have we had a president with these kinds of extensive business entanglements.”

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In February, Maryland's General Assembly gave Frosh the authority to sue the federal government without the approval of Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, or the legislature, currently controlled by Democrats.

The president’s tax returns, which Trump has refused to release despite a decades-long tradition of presidential candidates releasing them, will be sought through the discovery process if the case is allowed to proceed, Frosh said.

“We will be seeking the president’s financial information, including his tax returns,” the Maryland official said.

The lawsuit accuses Trump, via his businesses, of being “deeply enmeshed with a legion of foreign and domestic government actors.” His continued ownership of the Trump organizations constitutes “unprecedented constitutional violations,” the complaint says.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said he expected the Trump administration to seek the case's dismissal and disputed its allegations, telling reporters that the president's business interests were not dissimilar from those of Penny Pritzker, the Chicago billionaire who served as secretary of commerce under former President Barack Obama, and other past White House officials.

Spicer suggested that the case has parallels to another one already making its way through the courts that the Justice Department late last week asked to have thrown out. That case was filed by the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog group that goes by the acronym CREW, which is also acting as an outside counsel to the two attorneys general in the case filed Monday against the president.

"It's not hard to conclude that partisan politics may be one of the motivations" for the lawsuit, Spicer said Monday. "The suit was filed by two Democratic attorney generals. The lawyers driving the suit are an advocacy group with partisan ties. It actually started with a press conference as opposed to filing it, which is interesting."

A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, which lately has taken a more prominent surrogate role in defense of the White House, called the lawsuit "absurd" and said the president has "been committed to complete transparency and compliance with the law."

"The actions of the attorneys general represent the kind of partisan grandstanding voters across the country have come to despise," RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Jancek said in a statement. "The American people elected President Trump to lead this country, and it is time Democrats end their efforts to delegitimize his presidency.”

Even if the attorneys general were to get access to Trump’s tax returns, it’s unlikely the documents would be made public through this suit, since such records are typically subject to confidentiality restrictions imposed by the courts.

The suit invokes several anti-corruption provisions in the Constitution, including the foreign emoluments clause and another part banning presidents from supplementing their salaries with other payments from the U.S. government or state governments.

At a news conference in January before his inauguration, the president and his legal team announced that the Trump Organization would donate money earned at its hotels from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury. But last March, the Trump Organization announced that it would not begin making those donations until 2018, an announcement that was followed in May by another one in which the organization declared that it will be “impractical” to single out foreign guests in order to transfer their payments to the Treasury.

The new suit has been assigned to Judge Peter Messitte, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.

Plans for the suit were first reported by the The Washington Post.