John,

Donald Trump met with oil executives at Mar-a-Lago last month, and here’s what he told them:

Trump reportedly asked Big Oil executives to raise $1 billion for him and told them in exchange, if he became president again he would immediately reverse dozens of environmental rules and stop new climate protections from being enacted.

He said giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” because of the money they would save in taxes and because of the regulation they would avoid.

Politicians often fundraise with a nudge and a wink. But to essentially say "raise a billion dollars for me and I’ll get rid of the regulations that you don’t like" is especially egregious. Put simply, this is blatant corruption. This is a quid pro quo. And this looks a whole lot like bribery.

As CREW’s Chief Ethics Counsel, Virginia Canter recently told the Guardian, we’re taking a very serious look at whether Trump’s fundraising pitch to the oil executives merits legal further action.

But unfortunately John, as I recently told MSNBC, this is also an extreme example of the way our campaign finance system works. A candidate can get vast amounts of money in campaign contributions, not just to their campaign, but to super PACs and dark money nonprofits from very wealthy people and huge corporations.

Of course donors are going to want policies that benefit them in exchange for that money. That is baked into our system that the Supreme Court supercharged when it allowed all kinds of huge money contributions in Citizens United.

While this has been normalized since the Citizens United decision in 2010, Donald Trump has gone further than just about anybody else.

We need to pass laws to change the system. And we need to hold Trump accountable for this blatant quid pro quo.

CREW’s mission for years has been to get the untold sums of anonymous money out of our politics, and we’ll keep up the fight, but we need your support.

Stay tuned for more from CREW on this.

Thanks,

Noah Bookbinder
President
CREW