CNN Chief National Affairs Correspondent Jeff Zeleny gave a blunt assessment of President Donald Trump’s dinner with holders of the president’s cryptocurrency on Wednesday night.
Earlier this month, Trump announced he would hold a private dinner with the top 220 investors of his $TRUMP meme coin, which Reuters said netted the president $148 million. Most of the guests are not publicly known, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was noncommittal when asked if the White House would make the names public.
“The president is attending it in his personal time,” Leavitt said during Thursday’s briefing. “It is not a White House dinner, it’s not taking place here at the White House.”
The dinner raises obvious ethical concerns, which are supercharged by the fact that many of the investors hail from other countries. This was not lost on Zeleny, who reported from the White House during Thursday’s OutFront on CNN, where he said Trump is flat-out “enriching himself.”
“There are people here at the White House and certainly close advisers and admirers of the president who are uncomfortable by this,” he noted. “And here is why. For all of the dinners and campaign events that the president has hosted at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster or his golf club here outside Washington, this is different in every way because it has nothing to do with Republican Party politics. It has nothing to do with helping reelect House members or senators. It has everything to do with enriching himself and the Trump family and organization. That’s what this is about.”
Zeleny added that the White House was caught off guard by the number of allies expressing concern over the dinner.
“But he is going ahead with it at this moment,” he said. “He is arriving, likely to his golf course, and he is
going to be sitting down with this. But the bottom line is we do not know exactly who he is sitting down with, because the owners of these crypto accounts and these investors go by their trading names, if you will, not their own names. But we do know, because of reporting by Bloomberg and others, it is largely a list of foreign investors. So, this is why it’s different.”
