STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's bring a lawyer on this - an ethics lawyer - Richard Painter, the top ethics lawyer for the White House during George W. Bush's second term. He later ran for office as a Democrat and now teaches corporate law at the University of Minnesota Law School. Mr. Painter, welcome back.
RICHARD PAINTER: Well, thank you for having me.
INSKEEP: OK. I'm just going to ask it so you can answer it. What is the ethical issue with asking somebody to pay your $100,000 Amex bill?
PAINTER: Well, there's nothing wrong with getting a gift of $100,000 from someone who wants to give you money. But if you ask for that or anything else like that and you say you're going to do something in return as a United States ambassador to Greece or any other official position, that's called bribery. Yeah.
INSKEEP: OK.
PAINTER: And that violates the bribery statute. It could be a crime - 18 United States Code Section 201.
INSKEEP: Although this has then raised a question for some people who follow the Trump administration. They wonder - how does this compare with all the other ways that people close to the administration seem to have tried to make money?
PAINTER: Well, that's the problem here, and that's why voters are so angry. We see that the president of the United States himself has made over $1 billion in cryptocurrency, even though five years ago, he said that bitcoin was a scam. We see foreign governments investing in the cryptocurrency ventures of the Trump family. The president is going into many business ventures that he never even thought about during his first term - a thousand trades in stocks in the president's account. He's the first president in American history to have significant numbers of stock trades while he is in office, with access to information about what the government's going to do.
Now, he says that other people are doing the trading for him. But still, the voters don't buy this. The - Truth Social is selling to institutional investors access to - advanced access to the president's posts, which will include official business of the United States government. That could very well violate federal insider-trading laws - the violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibiting foreign government money from going to any United States government official. And yet the president of the United States has ignored that. He did also in his first term, but it's got much, much worse in his second term. The list goes on and on.
We did have some serious ethics issues during the Biden administration as well. This is not just about President Trump, but it is quite clear that this second Trump administration - in this administration, we've seen far more profiteering by the president and his family off public office. They even have a club in downtown Washington called the Executive Branch...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
PAINTER: ...Where people give - pay large amounts of money to join the club and schmooze with the top leaders in the administration. This is pay-to-play.
INSKEEP: I'm trying to figure out the difference here, though, because in this case, the president was concerned and seems to have forced a resignation. Is the difference simply that in all those other cases, it was Trump making the money or someone very close to him? And in this case, it was Kimberly Guilfoyle trying to get the money?
PAINTER: Well, that's one way to try to send a message to the voters a few weeks before the election that, well, we actually are committed to ethics. So find some sacrificial lamb, and he'll go ahead and fire them. I mean, this is pretty blatant, I've got to say, to say, pay off my $100,000 Amex bill and I'll, you know, introduce you to everybody in the Trump administration - if that's what happened. And I know that's contested.
INSKEEP: She's...
PAINTER: So...
INSKEEP: ...Denied it. Yeah.
PAINTER: And she's...
INSKEEP: Well...
PAINTER: ...Denied it.
INSKEEP: I want to ask one other thing in the minute that we have. There was this Supreme Court ruling that gave presidents broad immunity from prosecution even after they left office. And there are some distinctions. Your core constitutional functions you can't ever be prosecuted for. There might be some other cases where you could be prosecuted for. I'm just curious for your assessment as a lawyer. If, hypothetically, someone were to try to prosecute a former president for the kinds of acts you've just described, would the president be able to get out of it by saying, oh, no - that's my core constitutional duty to be doing those things?
PAINTER: Well, I'm sure the president could make that argument. And this is exactly what I warned against when I came out against that decision. And I warned the court in an amicus brief in that case that there could be severe ramifications if we gave the president immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts. And yet that's what the court did in Trump versus the United States.
INSKEEP: Do you think that these are - these allegations are prosecutable offenses, nevertheless?
PAINTER: They could be. If the president received a bribe, the receipt of a bribe itself is not an official act - is not within the scope of Trump versus the United States. But that case makes it very, very difficult...
INSKEEP: OK.
PAINTER: ...To prosecute the president.
INSKEEP: Got it. Mr. Painter, thanks so much. Really appreciate it.
PAINTER: Thank you.
INSKEEP: Richard Painter was a top White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. We'll note that NPR invited the State Department spokesperson to discuss the reporting on Kimberly Guilfoyle's alleged ethics violations, and he declined. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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