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Trump’s motorcade is parked next to an almost 13-year-old Qatari Boeing 747 sitting on the tarmac of Palm Beach International airport on Feb. 15. Photo by Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images.


** Qatar’s $400 Million Winged Gift to Trump
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Days before President Donald Trump embarked on a diplomatic tour of the Middle East, news reports surfaced that the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar had offered a gift of a Boeing 747-8 jet to replace the aging Air Force One aircrafts currently used by the president.

In a May 12 press conference, Trump said it would be “stupid” not to take the gift, which the administration has said would be accepted by the Department of Defense and later donated to Trump’s presidential library after he leaves office.

Democrats, meanwhile, have charged that Congress would need to approve this gift, or it would run afoul of the Constitution.

This week, Staff Writer Alan Jaffe delved into the legal questions surrounding the Qatari jet transaction.

As Alan writes, Democrats have said the gift would be a violation of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman of New York told CNN: “It is a gift from a foreign government that is expressly not permitted under the Constitution.”

The clause states, in part: “And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” The clause aims to prevent officeholders from being improperly influenced through the receipt of gifts.

So would accepting the plane be illegal? David Super, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown University Law Center, told Alan that it depends.

“If it is a gift to the president, it is clearly not legal,” Super said. “If, as the president has said, it is a gift to the United States government, that would be legal. But if there’s a proviso as has been reported that [the aircraft] would be made available to the president after he leaves office” as a part of his library museum, “then it would be illegal.”

Trump has said that the gift from Qatar would be offered “free of charge.” But Alan writes that the 747 formally used by the Qatari royal family would require considerable and costly upgrades to function as Air Force One.

Some Republicans have raised other concerns about the jet regarding national security and espionage.

For more, read Alan’s story: “Unwrapping Qatar’s $400 Million Winged Gift to Trump ([link removed]) .”
HOW WE KNOW
Competing claims about the contents of an intelligence assessment were settled when the Freedom of the Press Foundation obtained a copy of the National Intelligence Council memo via a Freedom of Information Act request. The April 7 intelligence assessment ([link removed]) broadly concluded that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s “regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with” the Tren de Aragua gang or “directing the [gang’s] movement to and operations in” the U.S., undercutting the basis for Trump’s March 15 invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport Venezuelan immigrants suspected of affiliation with Tren de Aragua. Read more: “Intelligence Memo Undercuts Trump’s Immigration Argument ([link removed]) .”
FEATURED FACTS
A RAND report determined that U.S. prescription drug prices are 2.78 times higher compared with 33 other developed countries from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based on 2022 data. The gap is bigger when comparing brand-name drugs, which on average are 4.22 times pricier in the U.S. before adjusting for discounts by manufacturers. Generic drugs, which account for 90% of the prescriptions filled in the U.S., are cheaper in the U.S. than most other countries. But they accounted for only 8% of U.S. prescription drug spending; brand-name drugs accounted for 87% of the total spending in 2022. Read more: “Q&A on Trump’s Prescription Drug Pricing Executive Order. ([link removed]) ”
WORTHY OF NOTE

FactCheck.org Director Lori Robertson was interviewed for a podcast produced by the Institute for Science & Policy at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. "The Compass Series ([link removed]) " podcast "explores critical topics at the intersection of science, policy, and human behavior."

The interview with the institute's executive director, Kristan Uhlenbrock, aired in the May 9 episode ([link removed]) .

Lori discussed how FactCheck.org does its work, how the information and fact-checking landscapes have changed over the past two decades, and how people can guard against misinformation.

"There's more claims to check; falsehoods are spreading more quickly. But also there's more access to accurate information as well," Lori said. "Almost everything is online now. If you're Googling to try to find out if something is correct, you're probably going to find the source material and what that claim is based on."

Other episodes ([link removed]) of the podcast series explore polarization, uncertainty in science, the value of scientific research and building trust.

Wrapping Up

Y lo que publicamos en español ([link removed]) (English versions are accessible in each story):
* La cambiante postura de Trump sobre quién es responsable por los cambios en el mercado bursátil ([link removed])
El presidente Donald Trump afirmó que la caída del mercado bursátil es “la Bolsa de Valores de Biden, no la de Trump” y que la caída no se debió a los aranceles. Nuestro gráfico muestra cómo reaccionaron los mercados tras los diversos anuncios arancelarios de Trump.

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