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In May, in the same week that President Trump accepted the gift of a $400 million Boeing 747-8 luxury jet from Qatar, I received a phone call from Kirsten Danis, the investigations editor at The New York Times.
She asked me how full my reporting plate was, and if I was interested in joining a temporary investigative team to dig into conflicts of interest in the second Trump administration.
Those conflicts, which are without any precedent in U.S. history, have thrown nearly every presidential norm, and potentially some laws, out the window. To cover them accurately and fairly, it would require a lot of reporting power, and a lot of teamwork.
I was delighted to jump in.
We knew that there was self-dealing unfolding before our eyes in the White House, that constitutional checks were being ignored or abandoned and that guardrails were being dismantled in real time. In just the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, Elon Musk, a private, unelected citizen who happened to be the president’s largest campaign donor, had been granted staggering authority to drastically shrink the federal government.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order deregulating the cryptocurrency industry just as his family began its own crypto business.
Lawsuits and investigations into friends and business partners of Mr. Trump were being abandoned or shelved.
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The post Investigating Steve Witkoff’s Sprawling Financial Empire appeared first on New York Times.
