Donald Trump Is for Sale. Who's Bidding? | Opinion

In 2020, as the standing attorney general of Minnesota, I took on a case that would change my life. The trial of George Floyd's killer was about so much more than convicting one rotten apple. It was about weeding out the toxins from a flawed justice system that fundamentally favors the elite.

And there is still so much work left to do.

I have been watching the trials of former President Donald Trump with as much interest as any of my fellow Americans. Here is a man who could very well be the next president of the United States, found guilty of 34 felony counts in a Manhattan courtroom, and facing dozens of other charges around the country, some far more serious.

But somehow, this now convicted felon is abusing legal loopholes to win the White House.

When Trump refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, he raised $250 million in donations. Trump then divided that money between two political action committees (PACs), "Save America" and "Make America Great Again."

And since 2021, Trump has been taking advantage of a legal defect that allows him to withdraw contributions from these political entities to bankroll his own personal court battles. By spring of this year, roughly $100 million was plundered to pay legal fees that ought to have been paid by the man himself.

Ironically, the more entangled Trump gets, the more money his donors send. In the 24 hours following his criminal convictions, Trump's election campaign received $53 million in fresh donations—with donors urged to part with their cash if they believe "President Trump did nothing wrong."

But with 54 criminal charges left to fight, Trump's financial demands still climb. He has forged a lucrative agreement with the Republican National Committee, conveniently co-chaired by his daughter-in-law, allowing him to suck "every single penny" out of the party.

Trump has effectively turned the Republican Party into a giant "third-party litigation funding" operation, where political campaign donations are directly financing his efforts to ward off multiple criminal prosecutions. This increasingly exposes America to interference from foreign interests.

Our campaign financing laws might well bar foreign nationals from making political donations, but foreign agents and registered lobbyists representing foreign clients can still legally bankroll political campaigns.

Worse, from 2016 to 2022, Trump has a long track record of illegally receiving foreign campaign contributions, including from Russian tycoons, a Ukrainian oligarch, Gulf petro-states, and even Chinese investors. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) appears largely impotent in enforcing the law.

Who knows how much foreign cash is pouring into his current campaign through wide-open legal loopholes? Such weakness in American institutions like the FEC are due to deeper problems with how the Western legal landscape can be so easily subjected to political interference.

Lack of transparency in how third parties can finance lawsuits—a burgeoning but entirely unregulated industry—means there are no limits on how much unidentified hedge funds invest in a lawsuit they think is profitable, and control it for their own ends. This is potentially giving dubious foreign interests free reign in the US court system.

The sheer scale of potential corruption is clear from one of the largest third party funded cases in history—where assets of a global oil firm were confiscated in Luxembourg on the basis of a dubious $15 billion ruling delivered by a criminally convicted arbitrator. The latter was paid an "unusually high fee" by a third-party funder now being subpoenaed in Manhattan for documents on "money transfers" which encouraged "criminal" misconduct.

Sanctioned Russian oligarchs are exploiting such loopholes to secretly bankroll New York lawsuits, hoping to rollback American sanctions. China too is financing intellectual property lawsuits in Manhattan to steal Western tech secrets from rival firms.

By opening the coffers of litigation funding to politically linked finance that encompasses all manner of bizarre interests, American laws have shown their vulnerability to demagoguery. Only in America can the first presidential candidate to land a criminal conviction brazenly sell America's future to the highest bidder, offering to dismantle President Joe Biden's climate policies in exchange for $1 billion in donations from Big Oil corporations, raising $12 million by promising to deregulate cryptocurrencies, and cozying up with a Republican mega-donor best known for his $20 billion stake in the parent company of Chinese social media giant TikTok.

And earlier this month, we learned that more than $3 million of Trump's PAC funds were routed through a mysterious firm that does not publicly disclose its ownership structure, nor the services it is providing.

If there is any lesson to be learned from Trump's devious games, it's that the United States is devastatingly unprepared. If it cannot sufficiently regulate political and litigation funding within its own borders, then it has little hope of shutting down the similar tactics of foreign rivals like Russia or China.

Keith Ellison has been the attorney general of Minnesota since 2019. He was first elected to public office in 2002 as a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives. In 2006, he became the first Muslim elected to Congress. Throughout his career, Ellison has championed social justice. He has used his legal prowess to pursue affordable, safe, and dignified living conditions for all Minnesotans. His work has focused largely on protecting consumers and holding large corporations accountable for their actions, as well as his successful conviction of George Floyd's killer in 2020. His latest book is "Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence."

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.