‘Outright Lies’: Congressman Brings Literal Receipts After Eric Trump Makes False Claim About Family’s Investments

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Eric Trump insisted on Friday that his family’s assets are invested in a “blind trust” that does not buy or sell individual stocks, but his claim was quickly rebutted by a congressman who linked to thousands of transactions indicating otherwise.

President Donald Trump disclosed a slew of stock trades from the first quarter, totaling between $220 million and $750 million, according to a filing released by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics on Thursday. The filing shows thousands of individual stock purchases and sales in a wide array of companies.

“Trump brought the NVIDIA CEO on his trip to China to lobby Xi Jinping to buy advanced AI chips, even though it would create a U.S. national security threat,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tweeted on Friday, referring to the president’s trip to China, where he was accompanied by Jensen Huang and other U.S. business executives, as well as Eric Trump, who has business ties to the Chinese Communist Party. “It turns out Trump also bought millions in NVIDIA’s stock.”

Eric Trump responded to the post by saying all family assets are in a blind trust and are “in broad market indexes,” as opposed to individual stocks:

All of our assets are invested in a blind trust by the largest financial institutions in broad market indexes. To suggest that individual stocks are being bought or sold, at the discretion of any member of the Trump family, would be a lie and blatantly false. Using a silly example, if you buy the “Schwab 1000,” you will get some exposure to Nvidia – as well as a 1,000 other U.S. companies large- and mid-cap stocks. It’s completely disingenuous to represent anything to the contrary. Please be better than this…

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) responded by linking to the disclosure signed by Donald Trump himself.

“Outright lies,” Beyer said. “Trump’s assets aren’t in a blind trust, and he bought and sold individual Nvidia stock in 15 separate transactions totaling millions of dollars. That’s what Trump’s financial disclosure – which has his signature – says. See for yourself.”

The disclosure, which is 113 pages long, shows 2,345 purchases, mostly of individual stocks, and 1,296 sales, mostly of individual stocks.

According to Fortune, Donald Trump is the first president since at least Lyndon Johnson to trade individual securities. Since Johnson, every president has placed their assets in a blind trust managed by independent trustees. Trump claimed during his first term that his assets were kept in such an arrangement, but Fortune noted that Walter Shaub, the head of the Office of Government Ethics, resigned in July 2017 and concluded that the blind trust was “not even halfway blind.”

The White House has insisted that “there are no conflicts of interest.”

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