I have problems with the Qatar plane deal.
My concerns are probably not what you think they would be.
I haven’t read the legal opinion on the subject co-written by our esteemed attorney general, Pam Bondi. It’s apparently not public yet. But in any event, I’m not all that fussed about the legality of the deal.
I’m worried that Trump—of all people—is being ripped off by foreigners.
Let’s deal with the law first.
To be clear, I haven’t done a moment’s legal research on this subject, and frankly don’t intend to—life being short and all. But my instinct is that Bondi may be right that giving the United States a jet doesn’t violate the law, and that transferring ownership of that jet to a presidential library doesn’t either.
The reason? Well, presidents often get gifts, and they are allowed to accept them in the name of the country. And then they tend to transfer them to entities like their presidential libraries.
Sure, sure. Gifts to presidents normally aren’t luxury jets that he can use after he leaves office.
And normally, when a presidential library owns an item. They don’t make that item available for the personal use of the former president.
But I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the law doesn’t make this distinction. Indeed, it would not shock me to learn that no legislator ever imagined the need to forbid the giving to the president of new, temporary Air Force One to be converted to the ownership of his private library at such time as he might need a private luxury jet in the future. A lot of deranged things are legal because nobody bothers to make them illegal because, well, nobody actually has ever done that sort of thing before.
So no, my objections to the Qatar plane gift scheme don’t flow from concerns about legality. But I would like to raise several issues that bother me about this plan—ones I hope the president will consider.
First, the plane is 13 years old. You read that correctly. A piddling little Middle Eastern autocracy is trying to bribe our president with a used plane. Now my sense of national pride has taken a few hits over the last several years. I used to believe all that shining city on a hill garbage, for example; now I’ll settle happily for a city that does not betray its friends and allies and kiss the asses of its enemies and whose people don’t end up bankrupt and oppressed and dying of measles.
But guys, there are limits. According to ABC News, “The plane will initially be transferred to the United States Air Force, which will modify the 13-year-old aircraft to meet the U.S. military specifications required for any aircraft used to transport the president of the United States, multiple sources familiar with the proposed arrangement said.”
In other words, we’re getting a used vehicle that needs a whole lot of work. That’s frankly beneath the national dignity of even our degraded status.
Next issue: the attorney general shouldn’t be giving legal advice to the president on this matter. She represents the used car dealership—or at least, she did until recently. Don’t take my word for this. You can look at her lobbying registration on behalf of the “Embassy of the State of Qatar,” for which she was paid $115,000 per month.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying she advised the Qataris on matters related to used vehicle dispositions. Her contract for “advising, counseling, and assisting the foreign principal in communication with U.S. government officials, U.S. business entities, and non-governmental audiences” dealt with human trafficking. Still, if she wasn’t paid to curry favor with American government officials on the engineering of $400 million gratuities, I nonetheless have a problem with our getting a cut-rate airplane in a deal okayed by a lobbyist for the dealership.
Next issue: we have not subjected this deal to competitive bidding.
Rich as the Qataris are, the Saudis and the Emiratis are no slouches in the bribery game. Putin has stolen a boatload of money over his long time in office. And the Norwegians, though they’re not so into the whole bribery thing, have a lot of capacity if they decide to play. Are we sure a $400 million used plane that needs work is the best we can do?
The good government type in me feels strongly that this is the sort of opportunity that should be posted in the Federal Register so that all entities—foreign and domestic, governmental, corporate, and individual—should have equal opportunity to offer a plane to the United States and its president.
Are we certain that, given their new-found solicitude for President Trump, Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos wouldn’t want a shot and wouldn’t outfit our president with a new plane? Are we sure that some country looking for a favorable trade deal wouldn’t make us a better offer than a mere $400 million plane? Are we sure that there isn’t a crypto bro somewhere who would make the payment in Trump Coins, so that the president gets the transaction fee, as well as the plane itself? The problem when you’re doing a single-bidder deal with a party whose legal adviser is conflicted is that you just don’t know whether the other side is really giving you their best offer or whether a competitive process would produce a better result.
I worry about it.
Then there are the counterintelligence concerns. Press reports indicate that a company called L3Harris has been commissioned to go through the plane to make it meet requirements for presidential security and communications. Now, if I were a foreign intelligence agency, I would have my eye on that plane. I mean, you only get so many chances to bug a presidential jet. And while I’m sure L3Harris is going to be extra careful in scrubbing the plane, it just has to be easier to get to a jet and bury things in it deep when it’s under the watchful eyes of the Qataris—who do business with everyone from Hamas to Iran—than when it’s being developed by a wasteful cost-overrunning U.S. defense contractor.
It’s one thing to get a used plane in a rip-off deal. It’s quite another thing to get a used plane in a rip-off deal that might be used to spy on us.
This brings me to my final point about this plane thing, which is the matter on which I would have most expected Trump to be sensitive: It’s another example of foreigners ripping us off. Sure, the plane was made in America—but that was 13 years ago. It’s a foreign plane now. If anyone else were importing it, Trump would subject it to tariffs.
More in sorrow than in anger, Laura Loomer tweeted over the weekend that while she loves President Trump, “I have to call a spade a spade. We cannot accept a $400 million ‘gift’ from jihadists in suits.” She’s rather misjudged Trump here, if we’re being honest; no principle, even his racism, overrides his desire for gifts—and this may leave the true racists “so disappointed.”
But I suspect she is not the only one misjudging things here. At a time when he’s suggesting that children make do with with two dolls—rather than 30—so that he can force manufacturing back to the United States, does the president really want to be flying around in a Qatari luxury jet okayed by his attorney general who was a registered Qatari agent until a few years ago?
– Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books. Published courtesy of Lawfare.
