The president of the United States, Donald Trump, undertakes travel this Monday for an official visit to countries of the Persian Gulf and already has at least one thing to bring under his arm: he plans to accept a Boeing 747-800, gift from the Catarí royal family, and use it as Air Force Onethe official White House plane. President’s advisors deny that there are legal obstacles to receive the luxurious gift, unprecedented in the almost 250 years of government history of the North American country.
The ABC News television network has advanced that the Trump administration is scheduled to announce the gift this next week, during the trip that the Republican leader will make to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates.
The president proposes to use it not only as his official plane. The idea is that the Department of Defense, on which the Air Force Oneaccept it and manage it throughout the stalegislature. Before the end of the mandate, in 2029, he will donate it to the Presidential Library of the Republican, who will continue to move in him as a private citizen.
The plane is so luxurious that it is known as a “flying palace.” Trump had seen it when the device was parked last February at West Palm Beach International Airport in Florida.
This unusual agreement has raised the doubt of whether it is legal – or ethical – that the administration accepts such a valuable gift of a foreign power. According to the newspaper The New York Timesa new unit of this plane model has a market price around 400 million dollars, about 375 million euros.
But ABC News points out that the lawyers of the Office of the Legal Advisor of the White House and the Department of Justice have concluded that it is legal, and they expose it in an analysis expressly written about the case for the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
According to ABC News, lawyers consider that accepting it does not violate the laws against bribery or the prohibition contained in the so -called “emolument clause” of the Constitution, which prevents any US government official from accepting gifts “of any king, prince or foreign state.”
The precedent on which the White House advisors are based is the plane Air Force One that Ronald Reagan used during his mandates, and that the Pentagon yielded to that president’s library after he left office, he points out The New York Times. But in that case, the plane was exposed on the land of the library in California, and Reagan did not use it for its private displacements.
The model that Trump would receive has about a decade of antiquity, he adds The New York Times. I could not use it immediately: once the Pentagon received it, the American Air Force would have to remodel it to meet the mandatory security standards for the presidential plane. It is a process that can take months or even years.
The known as Trump Force Onethat the Republican leader used as a private plane, is an old 757 that flew for the first time in the early 1990s and then acquired the co -founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen. Trump bought it in 2011.
During his first term (2017-2021), the Republican ordered the Pentagon Air Force One. The White House declared this February that the project “has been postponed for five years, postponed until 2029 or later, despite the fact that the contract was awarded in 2018”.
Qatar’s gift, according to The New York Timeswould fulfill the president’s desire to have a new Air Force Oneafter the repeated delays related to a government contract with Boeing for those two new devices.
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