Welcome to the beat. I'm Ari Melbert. We begin with President Trump, now moving forward on a

reported plan to get a giant gift for his administration, I guess personally, politically,

but then ultimately for himself through his library. This is a plan to take not a million

dollar gift or a $10 million thing, but actually $400 million of value from a foreign

government through the value of a jet. It is egregious. It is possibly illegal if Congress doesn't

approve it. You might remember all that talk about the Constitution and the emoluments clause,

but bottom line, there are also figures on the right who are concerned

because separate from the ethics and the obvious security implications, which we'll get to,

this just looks really bad, greedy, thirsty even. So here's the plane. That's from the royal

family of Qatar. It is a luxury Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

The Trump administration says they would take this jet that you're seeing certain pictures of

as a gift, and they would turn it into an Air Force One. And then they would keep it. So they'd use it

for a few years. That's the plan that we

have, according to the reporting. But then Donald Trump would get it afterward as a private citizen.

And the way they're finagling that is they say through his library, presidential library,

but bottom line, if he's allowed to fly around on the $40 million jet from the foreign

government, and only gave it to him because he was president of your country, which is supposed to be a public interest position,

well, it all looks pretty unseemly. There are questions here about national security,

about the constitutional ban on gifts, which back in the day they called emoluments.

The idea was even then they knew that foreign governments with

budgets and largesse could try to separate the leader of a country who's supposed to look out

for the country for you, separate that obligation from the leader's personal situation and throw

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