Fox Legal Analyst: Accepting Jet Is “Blatantly” Illegal

“It’s a violation of the Emoluments Clause. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m not just blown away by Pam Bondi’s legal analysis here. But it’s laughable. I mean, you know, she puts out that evidently they looked at it and they decided that it wasn’t a bribe under the way the Supreme Court interprets the federal bribery statute, which is, it makes it very hard under US against or is it McDonald against The United States? It makes it very hard to prove bribery.

“But as I pointed out in the column I wrote about this, the Emoluments Clause doesn’t prohibit bribery. That’s another part of the Constitution that says that bribery is an impeachment predicate. The Emoluments Clause prohibits gifts. And Trump came out and said, this is gonna be done in a completely public and transparent way. The problem isn’t transparency.

“That’s not what the Emoluments Clause is about. The problem is the transaction in the first place. And the fact that it’s public is even worse because that increases the prestige of the foreign element that could be corrupting the United States government. The Emoluments Clause doesn’t say, don’t take a gift unless you’re gonna do it very publicly and transparently. It says don’t take a gift.

“And the only out here is if Congress approves it, then you could do it. But Trump isn’t gonna ask Congress because there’s no way Congress would approve this because it’s a blatant violation of the Emoluments Clause.” – Fox News legal analyst Andy McCarthy.