“I’m allergic to free stuff.”
These are the words I said every time I gave ethics training to White House staff when I was Deputy White House Counsel under President Barack Obama. It was a plain English expression of the core principles of public service. That is, people exist to serve the public, not for their own benefit, and even small gifts impair judgment and undermine public trust.
It resonates this Presidents Day to realize that despite what our founders envisioned, the opposite has become the norm. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a $500 million transaction between the Sheikh and President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency company, World Financial Liberty, which allegedly sent $187 million to entities tied to the Trump family just four days before the 2025 presidential inauguration. Surprisingly, this has barely appeared in the news.
A $500 million transaction between the Sheikh Sultan and President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency company sent $187 million to entities tied to the Trump family just four days before the 2025 presidential inauguration.
When I told the staff I was allergic to freebies, they told me not to accept more than cans of soda from people who had business in front of the White House. But something of an order of magnitude more importance was being reported here, and as a nation we cared little about it. That’s a dangerous mistake. What the Journal report describes threatens not only public trust and public decision-making, but also national security.
The founders were clearly aware of this danger. Alexander Hamilton warned that the republic was “susceptible to foreign corruption.” To prevent that, the Founders included the Foreign Emoluments Clause in the Constitution, prohibiting federal employees from receiving “gifts, emoluments, offices, titles, or anything of any kind” from foreign countries without the consent of Congress.
