Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melburgh, and I'll tell you right off top. Our lead-off guest tonight is the top Democrat in Congress. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. We're going to get into this major news on Trump trying to pocket money from the executive branch, the shutdown, and the no-king's protest. So we appreciate the leader being here. He'll join us momentarily. The story rocking the Trump White House right now is about rank profiteering,

an ethics scandal about conflicts and corruption.

The headline is President Trump is trying to move over $200 million from taxpayers into his own pocket.

It is a blatant grift.

It's an ethics scandal, but it actually gets worse in the details of why the

president claims that he should be paid out of the federal funds. You, of course, pay through your

tax dollars. Trump demanding that his own DOJ, which he's still overseas, of course, in the cabinet,

pay him $230 million from taxpayers. He cites his own conduct that led to

pass federal investigations as the reasoning. Now, just off top here, no president has ever

tried to take money directly for himself from the DOJ like this. Never. The plot comes also as an

escalation of a range of profiteering and ethics

scandals by Trump himself, as well as his family members. He's insisted on profiteering from his

business's wall in office. No other president's done that. And most other presidents have had

other jobs or worked at law firms, but they cut that off in office.

He has not. He's offered White House access recently to crypto investors. Again, that's not political

campaign donors only. It's just people involved in enriching him and his family's crypto funds.

His family also trades on his government power across several businesses. It's almost hard to keep

track of. So this damning bombshell from the New York Times today comes in this context. It's about the

money first, shaking down the government second, a kind of a king attitude of, hey, he is the state.

The state is him, even as there is a no king's backlash that we've all been covering.

And then basically third, Trump is claiming the reason, because they're still pushing some sort of reason.

The tax fare should pay him, compensate him, is because of his own conduct that led to him being under federal investigation.

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