President Trump is on his way back from visiting three Middle Eastern nations where the Trump family has deep business ties.

Over the past month, billions of dollars have poured into Trump-owned companies, reviving a longstanding ethical debate from his first term.

Are the president's financial windfalls for his businesses influencing government policy?

Our White House correspondent, Laura Barone Lopez,

has a look.

On the first foreign trip of his second term, President Trump is once again paying special

attention to the Middle East. I'm honored to be the first American president ever to officially

visit your great country.

It's a region where the president's political and personal interests increasingly overlap.

I think it's a great gesture from Qatar. I appreciate it very much.

The president's meetings in Qatar come just days after saying he would accept a major gift from the country,

a new luxury jet to replace Air Force One.

I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer. I mean, I could be a stupid person, say, no, we don't want a free, very expensive airplane. But the jet, worth an estimated $400 million, has set off ethical and legal alarm bells.

It's entirely unprecedented. I'm certainly not aware of any kind of gift from a foreign nation that is even in the ballpark of this.

Noah Bookbinder is the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

and a former public corruption attorney for the Justice Department.

Questions about Trump's potential use of the plane after he leaves office miss the larger conflict,

Bookbinder says.

Some of these transactions may turn out to be kind of just on the right side of the law. Some of them may well end up

violating the Constitution. But even where there is technical legality, where you have a senior

government official getting personal benefits from people who have every reason to want to influence

their policy decisions, that's inherently corrupt.

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