Two Democratic senators asked inspectors general at the Commerce and State Departments to investigate whether Trump administration officials violated ethics rules in a pair of multibillion-dollar deals involving the United Arab Emirates.
One enriched the families of President Trump and one of his advisers; the other raised national security concerns among White House staff.
The call from the Senate Democrats came in response to an investigation published by The New York Times last week that examined the two Trump-era transactions with Emirati royals.
One of the deals involved a plan by the United States to allow the Emirates to import American-designed artificial intelligence computer chips.
The other entailed a government-backed Emirati firm sending $2 billion to a cryptocurrency company created by the Trumps and the family of one of his advisers, Steve Witkoff. For the first six months of this year, Mr. Witkoff has formally served as a State Department employee, before transferring to a White House job.
“The pattern of these transactions is deeply troubling,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, wrote in the letter to the acting inspectors general at State and Commerce, as well as the Office of Government Ethics.
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