If Attorney General Pam Bondi has her way, we won’t learn the staggering amount of taxpayer dollars spent turning the Qatari government’s “gift” of a jet into the Flying Bribe Palace that President Donald Trump envisions until well after it would matter. There’s no non-nefarious explanation for her refusal to release the Department of Justice memo claiming that it is “legally permissible” for the sitting president to accept a $400 million gift from a foreign government in a timely manner. It’s a refusal that has necessitated the Freedom of the Press Foundation filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to try to shake this thing loose.
Pam, if you think the Emoluments Clause ain’t shit, say it with your whole chest! Don’t hide your keen legal analysis under a bushel! America would love to see how you, a former lobbyist for the Qatari government, decided it wasn’t a conflict of interest for you to bless this arrangement. It would also be thrilling to know how you decided this wasn’t just a $400 million bribe that a noncorrupt president would have run screaming from.
On May 15, a day after reports that Bondi’s signature on an Office of Legal Counsel memo was what cleared the way for the flagrantly obvious bribe, the Freedom of the Press foundation filed an expedited FOIA request for the memo. Then they waited. And waited. After following up on June 16, they got a boilerplate response that was equal parts brushoff and lie:
Please be advised that the search for your request is ongoing and accordingly we have limited information with which to provide an estimated date of completion. Until we have completed our search and know what processing must be done (such as consultations with other offices whose information might exist in any material we find), the best estimate I can provide is the average processing time for requests in this Office’s expedited track which is 620 days as published in DOJ’s Fiscal Year 2024 annual report. 620 days from when your request was received in this Office on May 15, 2025 would be January 25, 2027. Please remember that this is an estimate based on limited information and accordingly subject to variation.
Guys: It’s a memo. One memo. That Bondi and Trump have both confirmed and bragged about. There’s no “search for your request” going on, and the way you provide FOIA response estimates is not to just say, “Well, right now everything takes 620 days, so that’s when you’ll get it. Maybe.” Certain FOIA requests may take internal priority, certain FOIA requests may be voluminous, certain FOIA requests may affect scores of departments, and certain FOIA requests may need tons of complex redactions. This is literally a request for one specific document the government revealed exists by bragging about how it allowed Qatar to bribe Trump. But per the DOJ, their best guess as to when they might find the time to release it just happens to fall after not just the midterm elections but also the seating of the new Congress. Handy
It also seems to be a date chosen to get past the time expected to rehab the Qatari jet into the gold-plated monstrosity that Trump’s “taste” demands and to make it viable to be used as Air Force One. Would you like to know how many of your taxpayer dollars are going toward this? You can’t. It’s a secret. No, really.
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The administration has classified the information, but it does appear that the funding stream is coming out of an existing project to modernize America’s nuclear missiles. $934 million appears to have been transferred out of that and into an unnamed classified project, one which even The New York Times says is “almost certainly” the Qatari jet refurb.
It’s estimated that the work will take a year or two, which means that the administration has to run out the clock on providing any information that might cause a public outcry. Trump needs taxpayers to unknowingly give an assist to the Qatari government’s method of securing favorable treatment from him and not stop his gold-plated dreams with nonsense like how illegal this all is. Especially because Americans are not exactly wild about this whole thing.
But the longer this stays in the dark, the more likely we’ll all have paid for most of what Trump wants before anyone is the wiser. And remember, no matter how much of your money is spent on this thing, in the end it benefits Trump personally, as it will go off with him to his eventual Stationary Bribe Palace—his presidential library.
Yes, the jet will join the billions and billions of dollars extracted from feckless media companies eager to curry favor with Trump. It would have been cheaper for media moguls just to buy him a jet or two, honestly.
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The fight over this will end up where all these fights over Trump’s corruption do: the United States Supreme Court. You just know that Justice Clarence Thomas has already prewritten the majority opinion explaining how it isn’t a bribe when the president does it. Oh, and in a tiny footnote at the bottom: It isn’t a bribe when Justice Thomas lets billionaires with business before the highest court pick up his vacation tab, so stop bothering him.
Corruption begets—and protects—corruption, and the rest of us are all literally paying the price.