00:00A Pentagon awarded contract to a company with close ties to Donald Trump Jr. has led to some ethical questions.
00:08The Pentagon awarded a contract to Florida-based company Unusual Machines to build 3,500 drone motors and other parts.
00:17Trump Jr. is a major shareholder with that company and will benefit financially from this deal.
00:22The president's son also helped to screen candidates for top jobs at the Pentagon following his father's election.
00:28This is very problematic from an ethics perspective to have the grown children of the president of the United States entering into contracts with the Department of Defense without rigorous review of those contracts by independent experts to determine whether the contract is in the interest of the United States in our national security and at a fair price.
00:53This is very inappropriate unless those precautions have been taken.
01:00Spokespeople for Trump Jr. denied that he reached out to government officials on behalf of Unusual Machines.
01:06Don has never communicated with anyone in the administration on behalf of Unusual Machines or about the contract in question.
01:15His advisory role with them has nothing to do with interfacing with the government.
01:18A spokesperson told the Financial Times, Trump Jr. isn't the first presidential child dealing with ethics questions.
01:25Ethics officials were critical of Joe Biden's son Hunter sitting on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father was vice president.
01:33It was on a much smaller scale, but Hunter Biden's involvement in Ukraine at the time that his father was vice president of the United States handling Ukraine policy for President Obama, that was very, very problematic what was going on there.
01:48For the Trump family, this is not the first ethics issue to arise, including over a cryptocurrency company founded by Trump and his sons that's worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
01:58There are massive amount of campaign contributions coming into this Congress from the crypto industry.
02:04Do you want to apologize to Senator Gillibrand?
02:06That's Painter testifying before the Senate Banking Committee in July over Trump's crypto investments.
02:12This appears to be part of a pattern of President Trump's grown children, Don Jr. and Eric, and that we also see Jared and Ivanka, now that they're not in the Trump administration, and others in the Trump family benefiting from official decisions by the president himself or members of his administration.
02:37The Trump family has accumulated billions of dollars of cryptocurrency that they didn't have just a few years ago.
02:44While there are ethical concerns over deals like this latest drone contract, there's nothing illegal about it.
02:50However, Painter believes Congress should be investigating and laws should be changed.
02:55This is very, very concerning for our national security as well as from the vantage point of the taxpayer.
03:02But Congress has a responsibility to act and should do so by passing new legislation that would restrict this kind of thing.
03:09For Straight Arrow News, I'm Lauren Keenan. If you want more on this story, download the Straight Arrow News app or visit SIN.com.
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