Fox News legal analyst says that Trump's proposal to accept a luxury plane from the Qatari royal family violates the Constitution
Fox News legal analyst Andy McCarthy: “I think 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.”
Published
Andy McCarthy and Rich Lowry discuss Trump accepting a luxury plane from the Qatari royal family
Citation
From the May 14, 2025, edition of National Review's The McCarthy Report
RICH LOWRY: So let's get to the plane. It's been a big controversy last several days. Trump says he's still doing this, but nothing concrete's happened. Right? But he says he's gonna accept this Qatari plane and use it as Air Force One, and then it'll be transferred over to his presidential library.
His lawyers think they've crafted a way that this is totally, legal not, necessarily very ethical, but people have raised a lot of concerns, the way it looks, the nature of the Qatari regime, which we've just talked about, security concerns about what sort of listening devices or other malicious technology might be on such such a plane, and then the fact that this ultimately would be benefiting Trump himself personally after he leaves office, and you are not enamored at this idea.
ANDY MCCARTHY: Well, I think 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.
LOWRY: So even so it doesn't matter whether if Qataris gave us the plane and it was just gonna be Air Force One and and JD or AOC or whoever was gonna use it three and a half years from now, would that still be a gift that needs the approval of Congress, or is the issue that Trump or Trump's library is gonna end up keeping it afterwards?
MCCARTHY: Well, any smart administration, if a foreign government wanted to give any gift to our country like the Statue of Liberty in the late nineteenth century, it would be wise to go to Congress and have Congress sign off on it.
LOWRY: Which they did with the Statue of Liberty.
MCCARTHY: Yes. But by text, the Emoluments Clause applies to officials, not departments of The United States or not the American people. So if as a matter of fact, a gift was being made you know, Trump keeps saying this is a gift to the defense department, and my attitude about that is if it was really a gift to the defense department, which it's hard to keep a straight face saying that, but if it really were, then what would be the problem of going to Congress and saying a country wants to give us a, you know, a billion dollar plane or $400,000,000 plane.
LOWRY: They wanted to give us a wing of fighter jets. Right?
MCCARTHY: Yeah. But you go to Congress and say, what do you think? Right? Trump isn't gonna do that because it's for him. And, you know, he knows that.
But the Emoluments Clause applies to government officials. It says says any person who holds an office of trust of The United States, and that obviously includes the president. The other thing, Richard, you know, by and by, you know, we've talked a lot about the Emoluments Clause. As I said a second ago, and I think this is gonna become more relevant over time, which is why I've spent so much time on this cryptocurrency stuff. Bribery is a separate stand alone predicate for impeachment.
One of the biggest I mean, I wrote a book about this too, about the, about impeachment, back in 2014. One of the biggest things that the framers were concerned about when they were creating the office of the presidency and the awesome powers that went with it, which, by the way, were not as awesome at the end of the eighteenth century as they are today because over the last century, there's been a significant transfer of power from, you know, the article one branch to the article two branch. But if we just go back to 1787, what the framers were worried about was the idea that the awesome power that they reposed in the executive branch in the one person in the executive branch in the office of the president, that that could be purchased by foreign powers, or that, foreign powers could have, put the president in a position where the president was compromised, and that the powers of the presidency would be put in the service of foreign powers. That was one of the things they were most worried about. That's part of the reason that there's an Emoluments Clause, and it's a big reason why bribery is a separate you know, what the bribery clause says is that you can be impeached for treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors.
So we usually talk about impeachment in terms of high crimes and misdemeanors because we don't think, up until now, we haven't thought, that we're gonna have presidents who commit treason, which is a hard crime to commit because there has to be an enemy of The United States. We have to really be in a war kind of situation. But I don't think anybody's thought that it would be politically survivable for a president to take lots and lots of money or, you know, similar kind of consideration from foreign powers. But bribery is a separate reason for impeachment. And just to finish the point, I think Trump's not worried about the Emoluments Clause, and he's not worried about bribery because he figures he's got the Republicans in Congress completely cowed, and there isn't a credible impeachment threat.
And as I argued in that book, if there's no credible impeachment threat, if the Congress does not believe that it has to be a check on executive excess, then the only limits on presidential power are what the president thinks he can get away with politically.
LOWRY: So back to the plane. So there's no there's no case that this would be a gift to the office of the presidency or they're saying that Department of Defense rather than an official in particular if were just to be used as Air Force One for the next three decades, for instance? Or even that is still a gift and it has to be approved?
MCCARTHY: I think you'd be nuts not to approve it, but see, the thing is, Rich, as you were describing that, two things occur to me. One is, you know, I've been a lawyer for a long time. Lawyers, a part of the reason that, the wordcraft of lawyering is something that people pay a lot of money for is they get they essentially what they do is they try to describe things in a way that brings them within the ambit of the law even if the even if the textual description is not really an accurate reflection of reality. Right? That's what lawyers do.
So it wouldn't surprise me if they could come up with some clever, you know, like, sometime when I was younger, did you know that abortion became choice? I had no idea. You know? So, like, they could come up with words to describe it in a way that they think will be, you know, mellifluous and wonderful and acceptable, but it's still gonna be what it is, which is a gift to Trump. That's what lawyers do. But the other thing that occurred to me as you were describing it as, if you weren't gonna play word games and you are actually gonna structure the thing that in a way that would be acceptable under the Constitution, the closer you get to that as you were describing it, the more I'm thinking, well, then why wouldn't you wanna go to Congress with that? You know, if it's totally on the up and up and it's a gift to the office of the presidency or it's a gift to the defense department or it's a gift to some institution or it's a gift to the American people, why wouldn't you just go to Congress?
You would easily, as the president, you'd be able to go to Congress and say, look, this isn't for me. This is for the country. It's for the good of the country. Why wouldn't we do this?
And then you put it on Congress to say, no, we can't do that. I don't think Trump has any intention of going to Congress over this. And it just occurs to me as you're describing it that the more work you actually do to make it something that would be acceptable, constitutionally speaking, the less reason there is not to go to Congress.
LOWRY: Yeah. So do you think you'll go through with this?
MCCARTHY: Yeah. Yeah, actually I no longer think it's the most outrageous thing that I've heard even this week. Yeah. So, yes, I do.