By Steve Neavling
Ticklethewire.com
President Trump’s bold decision to intervene in a plan to move the FBI headquarters, which is across the street from his hotel, may be a violation of the Emoluments Clauses of the constitution.
NBC News reports that it’s “the strongest evidence yet that the president of the United States is tampering with American security to avoid disadvantaging his businesses.”
TickletheWire.com previously reported that administration officials, under “direction from the White House,” plotted to end a long-planned project to relocate the FBI to a new suburban campus.
“We cannot have the most powerful person in the world making national and domestic security decisions based on how his business might be impacted,?” wrote Noah Bookbinder and Norman Eisen of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has already filed multiple lawsuits challenging the president’s “flagrant violation of the Emoluments Clause.”
Since 2005, the federal government has been planning to move the FBI out of its cramped, squalid headquarters to the suburbs. But doing so would put the current space up for sale to a possible hotel competitor.
“Were the bureau to relocate, its old space would be sold off to developers to cover some of the cost of the relocation, Bookbinder and Eisen wrote. “And that sale and redevelopment could mean competition for President Trump’s hotel or the restaurants inside of it, and correspondingly less money flowing into his presidential pockets.”
