Usually when we talk about Donald Trump and suits, we’re making fun of one of those boxy Joseph A. Bank-looking nightmares that the president has tailored to conceal his curiously Kardashian-like badonkadonk.
Or ya know, one of the thousands of lawsuits that have been brought against Trump over the years for everything from hiring people to do work and then just not paying him to the unconstitutional nature of his controversial Muslim travel ban.
But when you’re the Donald, little legal beefs with the plebes are handled quickly and relatively cheaply by the semi-literate attorney who’s still somehow your main legal counsel.
Lawsuits brought by state attorney generals, however, are a very different story.
Officials representing Maryland and Washington, D.C. (not a state, but meh … close enough) announced on Sunday night that they plan to file suit against Trump for violating anti-corruption restrictions found in the Constitution.
The AGs will reportedly file suit as early as Monday, and will reveal further details of the legal action at that time.
The move will mark the first time that Trump has been sued by government entities as a result of his business interests.
A non-profit activist group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington recently filed a similar suit, citing Trump’s “countless conflicts of interest.”
Like the Logan Act, which has allegedly been violated by Gen. Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Carter Page, and several others who worked on the Trump campaign, the emoluments clause is one of those arcane rules from history that you never learned about in social studies because it was just widely assumed no president would ever be in violation.
The clause prohibits presidents from receiving any sort of income from foreign governments.
Before the president was sworn into office in January, Trump’s team promised to track and donate to charity all profits traceable to heads of state.
To the surprise of maybe like three dudes still wearing MAGA hats, that hasn’t happened.
New reports from NBC and MSNBC show that income from foreign governments hasn’t been tracked at all, and in a statement that’s ballsy even by the standards of these highly testicular times, the Trump Organization admits that it has made no effort to do so:
“To attempt to individually track and distinctly attribute certain business-related costs as specifically identifiable to a particular customer group is not practical,” says a spokesperson.
Read: “That thing we said we were gonna do? Yeah, we never even tried. Too hard.”
Obviously, all of this is separate from the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and allegations that the president obstructed justice by encouraging FBI director James Comey to halt his investigation into Flynn.
Are we tired of winning yet, folks?
