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Joshua Roberts / Reuters
WASHINGTON — The first major lawsuit against President Trump's alleged business conflicts is being filed by some of the nation's top legal and ethics scholars on Monday, a liberal watchdog group announced Sunday evening.
“Never before have the people of the United States elected a President with business interests as vast, complicated, and secret as those of Donald J. Trump,” the lawsuit alleges, “creating countless conflicts of interest, as well as unprecedented influence by foreign governments.”
The lawsuit — a copy of which was reviewed by BuzzFeed News on Sunday evening — alleges violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause, violations that it claims “pose a grave threat to the United States and its citizens.”
The complaint is to be filed in federal court in New York on behalf of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — which on Friday filed a letter with the General Services Administration asking it to immediately begin investigating whether Trump's business had breached its lease of the Old Post Office building with the federal government.
“We did not want to get to this point. It was our hope that President Trump would take the necessary steps to avoid violating the Constitution before he took office,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said. “He did not. His constitutional violations are immediate and serious, so we were forced to take legal action.”
In addition to Bookbinder, the lawyers behind the lawsuit include prominent constitutional law professors Laurence Tribe and Erwin Chemerinsky, prior White House ethics lawyers Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, as well as Zephyr Teachout and Deepak Gupta.
News of the coming lawsuit was first reported by the New York Times.
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