TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. President Donald Trump made an estimated $2.2 billion last year, which was the first year of his second term. How did he manage to do that? That's what my guest, New York Times reporter Eric Lipton, has been investigating. He's uncovered business deals made by Trump and/or his sons, Don Jr. and Eric, that exploit the power of the presidency for self-enrichment, present conflicts of interest and violate norms. Lipton also uncovered conflicts of interest related to Trump's commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, as well as Lutnick's two sons. This year, Lipton won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of Times reporters who investigated how the president and his family have profited from White House deal-making. This was Lipton's fourth Pulitzer.
Last month, Lipton and four other Times reporters got something else as a result of their reporting - subpoenas from the Justice Department. The DOJ wanted to know the reporter's sources for a story about the luxurious plane donated as a gift to Trump from Qatar. At Trump's insistence that it serve as Air Force One, it had to be retrofitted with security measures it wasn't designed to accommodate, and it had to be finished within a year to meet Trump's deadline of the July Fourth Sesquicentennial celebration. Later in July, Trump made his first international flight in it for a NATO summit in Turkey, but he used an older Air Force One on the way back. The Times reporters uncovered that this was because after a ceasefire with Iran fell apart and the war resumed, there was a credible threat against Trump, and the retrofitted plane lacked sufficient security measures, despite Trump's earlier insistence that it was secure. Other recent stories Lipton has written about pertain to the industries the Trump administration regulates or makes decisions about and how he or his sons also made business deals in those sectors, including cryptocurrency, mining rare earth metals and nuclear power. We recorded our interview yesterday.
Eric Lipton, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Congratulations on your fourth Pulitzer.
ERIC LIPTON: Thank you so much for having me.
GROSS: So before we get to the subpoena, can you briefly add more to the Air Force One story that got you - I was going to say won you (laughter) - the subpoena?
LIPTON: Yeah. I mean, we had been tracking Trump's interest in having a new Air Force One since early 2025. After he returned to the White House, he was immediately obsessed with having a new plane. He felt like the old Air Force One does not kind of meet his standards, and it wasn't worthy of a leader, like, the Middle East leaders have these luxurious planes. He was very jealous, and he said so, and he wanted a fresh new plane with luxurious trappings. And so, as of early '25, we started to look at this plane that he identified that he wanted to get ahold of from the Qatari government.
And we were already skeptical by what we were told by people of the Air Force that it could ever be actually ready to serve as a mobile White House command center for the United States government. And so once it was delivered, we immediately began investigating that, and it became obvious based on the conversations that we had that there were shortcomings. There were shortcuts that were taken to get the plane to the president quickly, not only with its air defense systems, but with other smaller things like special exits that are there that are more secure, that are lower and that have built-in stairs that the president has to land at an airport without notice, and there's not ground crews, or a second backup power system for the plane that allows its engines to start faster, so it can get off the ground quickly if it has to, or if it has a power failure, it can still communicate internationally with military leaders or other world leaders. So these are things that are missing in the retrofitted plane and the rush to get it to him and get him a luxury ride.
GROSS: And even little things, like, a lot of the seats face sideways instead of facing forward, why is that basically prohibited on Air Force One?
LIPTON: Well, the FAA, when it certifies planes, it assumes that the plane is prepared for an emergency landing that's going to have a pretty intense, you know, g-force on your body. And so it tests the chairs to anticipate that force of an emergency landing. But when it's a sideways-facing chair, it has a different stress on your body. So this plane has sideways-facing chairs. It's a luxury environment. You know, it's a lounge kind of a setup. It's not really like a passenger plane. So they had to get certification from the FAA to be kind of a special condition outside of the normal FAA. And that didn't come until the day the plane started flying on July 1 of 2026.
GROSS: I have to say, it's not just Trump who flies on this plane. I mean, there's his - sometimes his Cabinet members, other people from his team, journalists.
LIPTON: It's true. I mean, it carries, you know, Cabinet members. It carries other world leaders, members of Congress. You know, there are dozens of people on that flight when he goes, you know, more than 100 at times. I mean, the truth of the matter is that this is a much newer plane than the old Air Force One that has been around since George H.W. Bush, and to some extent, it's a safer platform in the extent that it's a newer plane, but it does not have all the security trappings that are associated with Air Force One. And that's part of the reason that he acknowledged, you know, that he's going to max it up later this year, and they're going to take it out of service and to try to add some additional measures to it to try to get it closer to the standard that we expect nowadays to have, you know, kind of a flying Oval Office.
GROSS: So how much have taxpayers already spent retrofitting this plane?
LIPTON: I mean, it's sort of crazy, but they won't tell us. But it's clearly - it's close to $1 billion, it appears. They had said publicly that it was something around $400 million even after the plane was donated, but we know that it was hundreds of millions of dollars in addition to that, because they rushed so much to try to get this plane ready that they actually had to buy another Lufthansa 747-8 to train the pilots to fly this new plane because it has a different cockpit than the old Air Force One. First, they leased an Atlas cargo plane at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and then they bought another Lufthansa plane, which is sitting now in a hangar in - at the Andrews, you know, Air Force facility in Maryland, simply to train the pilots on it, because they had to transition so quickly to this because Trump wanted his new plane.
GROSS: One more thing about the security measures. Because that plane wasn't built for the kind of security that Air Force One needs, it's hard to retrofit it for some of the security needs because it's just not designed for it.
LIPTON: That's right. I mean, the Air Force One is actually designed to be able to keep flying in the event of a nuclear war - I mean, a terrible potential scenario. So they actually put, like, special shielding around all of the electrical wires and electrical components so that if there were to be an electromagnetic pulse, which can result from a nuclear weapon, that it doesn't lose electric power, which obviously - imagine what would happen on a plane if it lost electric power. That's an unbelievably complicated task. You have to basically, you know, get - expose all of the walls down to the wiring and then cover all of the wiring to put a shield around the wiring so that it's not, you know, disrupted by an electromagnetic pulse. That takes - in and of itself is a massively time consuming task that could not be done in the short period of time that Trump had to retrofit that plane.
GROSS: So let's talk about the subpoena. So you were served directly. Right?
LIPTON: Yeah. I can't talk about it too much, under instructions of lawyers. But my family and I were coming back from dinner on a Friday night, and as we arrived home, the FBI agents were sitting parked near our house, and they came out of their cars to the front of our house as my kids were outside playing with, you know, actually little sparklers after July Fourth. And they presented me with this subpoena, and it said that I needed to report to court to testify about our work around Air Force One.
GROSS: So it's been reported - and I know you can't really talk about this, but it's been reported that your phone records were subpoenaed, too. That's been quashed. So...
LIPTON: Yeah. That's right. They...
GROSS: ...That's not happening. But, you know, I'm thinking, like, if your phone records were actually subpoenaed, if the subpoena wasn't quashed, they'd have access not only to all your personal calls but perhaps to a lot of other sources having nothing to do with the story that they're actually investigating, but giving them leads if they want to crack down on other sources that you've spoken to over the years. So can you say anything about The New York Times' approach to fighting the subpoenas and upholding the right of journalists to not name their sources?
LIPTON: I mean, I - you know, The New York Times filed a motion in court to quash the subpoenas. It was very beautifully crafted. It was all about the freedom of the press and the important role that we play in society and democracy. And I was very proud of the intense effort that the paper put to articulate those arguments. And - but I can't get into the specifics of the case really at all, other than the fact that after those motions were introduced, the subpoenas were withdrawn.
GROSS: Now, there were reporters from The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal who were also - not related to this story, but who have also been subpoenaed by the Justice Department. There's a freelance writer who wrote for the Times who also got a subpoena. So it seems to be a pattern of subpoenaing journalists. And I'm thinking, OK. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times - they are all top news organizations. They have top legal departments. How many publications can afford to support their journalists? I mean, financially support all the legal fees and the time and the energy to back up their reporters after they're subpoenaed for their sources.
LIPTON: Clearly, this - you know, this was to intimidate us. But our response after we received the subpoenas was just to recommit to investigating more - spending more time on the story. We immediately initiated a two weeks of deeper reporting. And we did a super-comprehensive story that identified further security shortcomings on Air Force One. So we were not intimidated, and we just - we were committed to the story. And I'm really proud to work on a newspaper that has the resources and the determination to pursue stories, you know, regardless of people trying to get in our way.
GROSS: Well, let's take a short break here. Let me reintroduce you. My guest is four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lipton of The New York Times. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with New York Times reporter Eric Lipton. He's been investigating how President Trump and his family have profited from self-enriching White House deal-making, the conflicts of interest these business deals present and the ethical questions they raise.
So the Air Force One story that we've been talking about - it's part of your beat, which is profiteering from the presidency and the interconnection between policies and alliances he's making and the personal financial deals he and/or his sons are making. So let's talk about one of the deals that you recently wrote about pertaining to the tungsten mining industry. And before we get into the details, why is tungsten so important now?
LIPTON: So the United States needs certain metals to manufacture all kinds of products. But tungsten is particularly important because it is an incredibly hard and heat-resistant metal that is vital for missiles and other military uses. And so for the military, it's just vital to have access to a sufficient supply of tungsten at a time when we're, you know, at war in the Middle East and we are helping in Ukraine. And so, therefore, we have to have a steady supply of it. But China has been cutting off our supply to tungsten as part of a trade retaliation against President Trump and his tariffs.
So there's been an effort to try to increase the United States' access to tungsten and a bunch of other critical metals, and the Trump administration has been pouring an enormous amount of federal dollars into expanding our supply to these critical metals. And that's what we examined in our investigation. My colleague Paul Sonne and I looked at this.
GROSS: So the country where Trump has cut a big deal in terms of mining for tungsten is in Kazakhstan. Why Kazakhstan?
LIPTON: Kazakhstan is situated in-between Russia and China, happens to have a really large supply of it sitting in the ground. It's one of the largest untapped supplies of tungsten in the world sitting there, that the Soviets had first thought about exploiting. But they - the Soviet Union collapsed before they were ever able to do it. And so there's - the site is there, you know, waiting for someone to grab. It's potentially $80 billion worth of tungsten in the ground there.
And so this is how the United States then got involved. Both the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, and the president, Trump, became involved in negotiations in late 2025 with the president of Kazakhstan about potentially giving a small American-based company the right to open up a mine there and to extract that tungsten and to send a bunch of it to the United States.
GROSS: So who is this? What is this small company? And do they have experience in tungsten mining?
LIPTON: I mean, the small company currently goes by the name of Kaz Resources. The chief executive there and founder does have some experience in the mining sector. But they are not a - kind of, like, a Freeport-McMoRan - you know, huge global mining operator. They're a very small operation that does not have a great deal of experience in actually pulling tons of metal out of the ground. And they needed to raise capital. They needed to raise money. And they've come to the federal government to raise, you know, billions of dollars in financing to actually build the mine.
At the same time as they were asking for help from the United States government to get access to this mining site, they were also asking for help from the Commerce Department's, you know, associated financing arms to actually help cover the cost of building the mine.
GROSS: So why was this company chosen? Doesn't have a lot of experience. Doesn't have the capital. It's a small company, relatively speaking. How did they get chosen?
LIPTON: It's true that the company had started working with the Biden administration to try to see whether or not there were metals in Kazakhstan that it could tap into. And so it did have a relationship with the federal government that predated Trump's return to office. But once the - Howard Lutnick became the commerce secretary, he became an enormous advocate of this company. And he actually wrote a letter to the president of Kazakhstan, repeatedly urging the president of Kazakhstan to pick this one company to be their partner to open the mine there for tungsten. And so it was a bit of an open question as to why the United States was so intensely embracing this one company. And that was part of what we were examining in our investigation.
GROSS: What'd you learn about that?
LIPTON: I mean, the more we looked into it, what we learned is that not only was the company working with the Trump administration but that separately, through investment partners, that it was working with Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. through a series of other, you know, limited liability corporations and that separately, one of the business partners in the deal had turned to Howard Lutnick's sons to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in capital at the same time as Howard Lutnick was involved in negotiating access by these executives to the mine. So what we found was that there were family connections financially to the business partners involved in the same deal.
GROSS: Trump's sons Don Jr. and Eric started making related investments before the deal was made public. So no one else knew about the deal. Would you consider that a form of insider trading?
LIPTON: I mean, that gets a little bit farther than - you know, than the evidence that I have. What I know is that they were teamed up with this company called Dominari Securities, which is based in Trump Tower in New York, and that they became investors in a limited liability company that was looking to invest in the critical minerals sector. And around the same time as Howard Lutnick and the president were involved in negotiating access to this mine, they made their first investment in the company that is now called Kaz Resources. It is certainly odd to see that the sons of the president were actually invested in a company that the president himself was involved in helping get this deal in Kazakhstan. And it's why we wrote that story.
GROSS: Now, in reading this story, there are some really complicated - at least to me, they seem really complicated - business deals, where one company buys another company and changes the name of the company. And I'm wondering if that is a way of making things more opaque and kind of obscuring who the people behind those investments are and who the people who are profiting are - for example, obscuring the relationship of Trump's sons to these companies and to these deals. Is that an accurate way of reading it as a possibility?
LIPTON: I think the net result of all of these financial transactions - the permutations that were, you know, next to impossible to track - was that it did obscure who the investors were. And it takes a lot of effort to try to figure out the sequence of transformations of these various corporate entities. I mean, it was crazy. They purchased this tiny Hong Kong-based road-building company that was, you know, nearly bankrupt. And they purchased it because it was NASDAQ-traded, and then they changed its name. They took it over. And it became a vehicle for them to buy into this New York tungsten mining company, and it was almost impossible to track.
But was that intentional? I don't necessarily think so because ultimately they were the ones that disclosed that the Trumps were involved in the deal once it actually became public in April of 2026. But I think this illustrates the various complicated ways that people are trying to raise money without doing traditional, like, initial public offerings. It's a - basically a workaround to raise capital on the stock markets without actually, you know, building a company from the ground up.
GROSS: So now the Trump sons are invested in a company that is going or has already become public - publicly traded on the stock market?
LIPTON: It is publicly traded. That was part of it. The maneuver was to buy this failing Hong Kong-based road builder to merge with the company that's going to mine the tungsten in Kazakhstan. So now it's a publicly traded operation.
GROSS: OK. So do the Trump sons have an opportunity to profit from the fact that it's public - that it's publicly traded?
LIPTON: The stock has actually declined since we wrote the story. I think there's a fair amount of skepticism about this deal and an open question as to whether or not they're still going to get the federal financing. But if this project is successful and they get the federal financing - you know, more than $1 billion in federal financing to actually build the mine - and they start mining, then, yes, there's the potential to make a great deal of money for all of the investors.
There's a lot of ifs still with this project. It's unclear if it will happen. But, I mean, what we've seen - the pattern we're seeing - is that the Trump sons are investing in a bunch of different sectors that the president is involved in setting policy. It's cryptocurrency. It's the predictions markets. It's the nuclear energy industry. It's the mining industry. And they think that these are moves that are - that show their patriotism, that they're supporting their father's agenda. But at the same time, as their father is taking actions that benefit their business plans, they're moving in behind their dad and making investments that benefit from their dad's actions.
GROSS: Well, it's time for another break here, so let me reintroduce you. My guest is four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Eric Lipton. We'll be right back. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with New York Times reporter Eric Lipton. He's been investigating how President Trump and his family have profited from self-enriching White House deal-making, the conflicts of interest these business deals present and the ethical questions they raise. This year, Lipton won his fourth Pulitzer Prize. When we left off, we were talking about a Trump administration tungsten-mining deal in Kazakhstan. Within weeks of the deal, Trump's sons Don Jr. and Eric had investments related to that mining deal.
So the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, who's heavily involved in these tungsten deals - his sons are profiting too. Can you tell us more about how they're profiting or how they stand to potentially profit?
LIPTON: Yeah. So Lutnick - before he became the commerce secretary, he was running a company called Cantor Fitzgerald, which has a bunch of arms. But one of the things that they do is they help startups raise capital. And so what we found was that at the same time as Howard Lutnick is promoting the United States as a investor in mining companies, his - Cantor Fitzgerald has been helping some of the same mining companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars in private capital.
So as commerce secretary, he - in his role on some of the bodies like the Export-Import Bank and other federal agencies - those agencies have notified these companies that, we're going to give you billions of dollars of financing. And on the other side, the sons of Lutnick have been bringing them private financing, and they get paid fees.
And one of the reasons that the companies need private dollars is that the federal government has come and said, we're going to give you public financing. So all of a sudden, it's a lot easier for them to go to Wall Street and say, look, the federal government is giving us billions of dollars in financing. So don't you want to invest in us? So then his sons are there, basically through their companies, and raising private capital for these same mining companies. And they get paid fees right away. Whether or not those mining companies, you know, succeed or fail, you know, they are going to get paid a fee, and they've made those fees.
So what we found was there were, you know, almost a dozen companies that the Trump administration has agreed to help finance that the Lutnick companies have also done work with to help them raise capital since the beginning of 2025. So there's just, again, an intertwining of the public policy actions that the dad is taking and the private sector profitability that's coming from the actions that the sons are doing. It's a similar thing that's happening with the Trump sons that's happening with the Lutnick sons.
Now, again, both the White House and the Commerce Department and Cantor Fitzgerald each assert that there are no conflicts of interest, that the Trump sons are independent businesspeople who are making, you know, decisions to pursue, you know, their own business interests.
And Cantor Fitzgerald makes the point, which is true - is that it had been in the mining sector for a number of years and it's continuing to help its partners raise capital. Those are true things. But it does create an appearance, at a minimum, of a conflict of interest because, you know, Howard Lutnick is helping these same companies and helping bring them billions of dollars' worth of capital at the same time as the sons are helping bring private capital to these same companies. So it creates, at a minimum, an appearance of conflict of interest.
GROSS: Would it be fair to say maybe that's a reason why Howard Lutnick shouldn't be commerce secretary? If he is intertwined with businesses or if his sons are intertwined with businesses he's supposed to be helping regulate, maybe he's not the right guy for the job.
LIPTON: I mean, he has complied with the federal law, which requires him to divest of his holdings in Cantor Fitzgerald, and he has turned over his holdings to his sons and other family members. And so he does not actually legally have a conflict of interest.
I mean, it is an unusual situation to have a commerce secretary whose family is so deeply involved in financing the same sectors. You know, we've written about this a number of times now. The sons' company is financing data centers, which, you know, Howard Lutnick has been intensely involved with. They're funding the nuclear power industry, which again, Lutnick is intensely involved with, and they're funding the mining sector. And so in all three areas, Lutnick is driving federal policy, and the sons are helping fund the companies that are seeking to capture the profits from those policy changes that his dad is making.
Now, it is not a formal legal conflict of interest. But it does create the appearance of a conflict of interest on a scale that we have perhaps never seen for a commerce secretary, similar to the kind of - the scale of the conflict of interest that we're seeing with the president and his sons. It's just at a level that - it just really doesn't have precedent in American history. But is it technically illegal? You know, no, it's not, as far as I can tell. But it just - it creates a blending.
What - the thing is, in the United States, we are used to separating, you know, the job of running the federal government from the job of running your private businesses. And, you know, we're not the Middle East, where, you know, you're run by, you know, these - the royal family, and the royal family is both the government and the profit-making. You know, the royal families - they are - they own the oil company. They own everything. They own the economy. And they are also the decision-makers, and there's a blending of those roles which is - that's the way it works in the Middle East, in the sovereign, you know, world.
But that's not the way it works in the United States. We've had a tradition where the people that run the government - they disassociate themselves from the private sector interests. They put their holdings in blind trust. You know, they have - and they attempt to avoid conflicts of interest. But the Trump family has chosen to act differently. And there are no formal federal prohibitions on doing what they're doing, but it's raising a lot of questions. And it's also keeping us quite busy as reporters because we're determined to examine each one of these relationships that - to document it, to bring the facts out, to make it transparent and so people can at least know about what's happening.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Eric Lipton. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with New York Times reporter Eric Lipton. He's been investigating how President Trump and his family have profited from self-enriching White House deal-making, the conflicts of interest these deals present and the ethical questions they raise. This year, he won his fourth Pulitzer Prize.
So let's talk about another sector that the Trump family and the Lutnick family are profiting from, and this is nuclear technology. So one of the big recent events in the nuclear story is that Trump had seemingly made a deal with Saudi Arabia to sell Saudi Arabia nuclear technology for a nuclear reactor. That deal apparently fell apart. Can you just say a little about the deal and how it fell apart before we get into the conflicts of interest?
LIPTON: Yeah. So there was an agreement, which had been years in the making, to allow Saudi Arabia to have access to civilian nuclear technology from the United States to allow them to build nuclear power plants. And it's a way of diversifying their economy and also, you know, to start to move away from fossil fuels, as many of the Middle Eastern governments are trying to - they've been so dependent on fossil fuel wealth that they're trying to diversify themselves.
And so dating back to Trump's first term, they wanted access to the - Westinghouse, which is an American-based, Canadian-owned company that builds these massive nuclear power plants. They've wanted access to that technology. And so for the first time, the United States is now saying, we will let, you know, buy that technology and actually, you know, build nuclear power plants with it and also share the uranium, which has to power those plants.
And that's where the concern comes because that same uranium could be processed, ultimately, if it's not handled properly, and made into plutonium or other, you know, radioactive materials that can be used in nuclear weapons. So there's some concerns about nonproliferation that result from that deal. But that's what Trump has agreed so far - to share the civilian nuclear power technology with Saudi Arabia.
GROSS: But that deal fell apart.
LIPTON: That deal - it's unclear whether or not it's going to move ahead because shortly after he announced that, there was a fair amount of criticism. And then the president said publicly for the first time that in order for Saudi Arabia to get this, it would have to agree to the Abraham Accords, which is to normalize relations with Israel. And Saudi Arabia has been reluctant to do that because of the complicated nature of what's going on in the Middle East. And so that - Trump's demand that they agree to the Abraham Accords in exchange for access to civilian nuclear could mean that the deal does not move forward.
GROSS: So tell us a little about the plans that Trump's sons have in the nuclear industry. And whether it's directly related to the Saudi deal or not, Trump is trying to emphasize nuclear power, and that means that nuclear technology will be in more demand.
LIPTON: I mean, it's sort of similar to what we've seen with cryptocurrency and with mining and with the predictions markets. Again, the Trump sons and President Trump himself are moving to invest in the nuclear power sector right now. And it is one of the president's top initiatives. And again, the commerce secretary is involved in this. And the United States needs more electric power desperately, because the AI data centers are consuming a massive amount of electricity - also just consumers' air conditioning, electric vehicles. We need more electricity and we aren't building enough electric power plants. So one way to deal with that is to build nuclear power plants, which we haven't done on a large scale in decades in the United States because of concerns about the safety of nuclear power.
So the Trump administration is pouring massive amounts of federal funds to incentivize more nuclear power being built both in the United States and internationally. We are also pushing our allies to buy, you know, the Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear power plant design and to build it in Eastern Europe and to build it potentially in the Middle East. So we are now a merchant of nuclear power globally because of President Trump and Howard Lutnick and the Department of Energy. But again, this pattern that we've seen elsewhere is what's happening at the same time as the United States is pouring tens of billions of dollars behind this sector, the - President Trump and his sons and the Lutnick family are also investors - are making fees on the same sector.
You know, Trump Media, which the president is one of the largest shareholders of which owns Truth Social, where he posts all of his social media, suddenly, oddly, late last year, they announced that they are moving into the nuclear power sector. I mean, it was a very weird, you know - a social media company is going to become a nuclear power company. So they announced that they're going to merge with a nuclear fission company, which is another part of the nuclear sector that the federal government is helping try to boost. So that merger still has not happened, but the president himself could be financially benefiting from the push to build more nuclear power because Trump Media is going to become a nuclear power company itself.
And the Trump sons are also, you know, stakeholders in that company. Separately, the Trump sons have bought into another company that is trying to help build a nuclear power plant complex in Texas. And then, again, the Lutnick kids are helping a lot of these nuclear startups raise capital in the private sector market. So it's a pattern that we've seen in cryptocurrency and, you know, in critical metals and in nuclear power, in the defense sector. It's this intertwining of public policy actions and business deals that involve the families.
GROSS: Is there any oversight about this? Is there any regulatory agency or anything that has to approve these deals?
LIPTON: The business deals are largely being approved by the Export-Import Bank, and Howard Lutnick is on the board of the Export-Import Bank.
GROSS: OK.
LIPTON: And so are other Cabinet members. And so just really important to reiterate that both the Lutnick family, the Trump family, I mean, they don't see this as a conflict of interest. The families see themselves as patriots that are helping build important economic sectors in the United States and that is there's no insider information. You know, there's people that are trying to make money to build the economy.
GROSS: What's an alternate way of looking at it?
LIPTON: I mean, at a minimum, there's an appearance of a conflict of interest, and there's an intertwining of the federal interest and private interest, which is really unusual, and it creates - it undermines our confidence that the decisions are being made based purely on the merits. And it does create the appearance that some of these decisions are being motivated by desire for individual families to profit. And it's hurtful to our confidence in the integrity of our government that there is this blurring of lines, which just traditionally, the United States has really been committed to separating the personal financial interest of business people and the operations of the government that is trying to help the public at large.
GROSS: What has Trump or the White House or Lutnick or the Commerce Department had to say to you about when you ask them about potential conflicts of interest or ethical violations?
LIPTON: I mean, I engage with them pretty intensely, and they're generally very responsive, and we go back and forth if they think something is factually incorrect. I really appreciate their willingness to engage with me. They generally just reiterate what I reiterate, which is that, you know, the White House just says that the president has no conflicts of interest, and all he's doing is trying to help the American people. The Trump sons, you know, consistently say they are private businesspeople who are successful at what they do. And they're - and the Lutnick sons say that they - through Cantor - that they've been in these sectors for a long time, and they're continuing to help private businesses raise capital. So I engage with them each time, and I get statements from them. And we include the statements in the stories.
GROSS: So you've pointed out how the Trump family and the Lutnick family are profiting in the sectors that Trump and Lutnick regulate. Is that happening in other areas, too? And I'm thinking specifically of Steve Witkoff, who is the main Middle East negotiator, a special envoy. And his sons are involved with investments, and they've worked with Trump sons on some things. Can you talk about that a little bit?
LIPTON: That's right. And it's, again, super odd. We have these trio of sons - the Trump sons, the Lutnick sons and the Witkoff sons. And the Witkoffs are deeply involved in World Liberty Financial, which is the cryptocurrency company that President Trump and his sons helped found just before he returned to the White House. And that is actually, you know, the - one of the biggest sources of income of the $2.2 billion that Trump made in 2025. $1.4 billion came from cryptocurrency, and World Liberty is a huge source of that. And so - and the Witkoff sons are helping run World Liberty at the same time as Steve Witkoff was involved in negotiations in the Middle East that benefited some of their business partners.
So each one of these is so complicated, you could talk about it for hours, and it's quite a maze of challenges to sort of deconstruct and explain. But it is a bit crazy that there are three different sets of sons of prominent leaders in the current administration that are involved in business deals that benefit from or intertwine with what their dads are doing in office.
GROSS: Let's touch on the predictions market, which - it's such a controversial market right now. You can bet on anything. There's insider trading, including - like, the guy who runs Trump's teleprompter was involved with an insider trading thing 'cause he read the speech and he knew what Trump was going to say. So what are the business deals that the Trump family is involved with in the predictions market?
LIPTON: So again, you have a president who's setting policy by appointing a leadership at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees the predictions markets, at the same time as the Trump sons are advisers to or have financial ties to both of the two major predictions markets companies, Polymarket and Kalshi. So my two colleagues, Sharon LaFraniere and David Yaffe-Bellany, have largely been covering the predictions markets' actions. But it's another venue where there are these overlaps that are very unusual.
I mean, even now, Trump Media, in addition to becoming a nuclear company, is offering to sell immediate knowledge of what his Truth Social postings are, which are immediately affecting the markets and the - and particularly affecting the predictions markets. You know, if you pay them a special fee, you can instantaneously get access to the content of Trump's social postings. And it creates an appearance of an insider trading, you know, transaction. And, you know, Trump is the primary shareholder of Trump Media, and his sons are involved in running the company. So - and Trump Media itself is looking to move into the predictions markets. You know, it's just - everywhere you look, there are a blurring of lines.
GROSS: So is Congress, which is controlled by Republicans, investigating any of the stories that you have investigated and reported?
LIPTON: I mean, the Democrats continue to send letters to these agencies and to the White House asking questions about many of these stories. We see those letters. But no. I mean, the Republicans who have subpoena power in both the House and the Senate - they're working on, you know, investigating Fauci and the pandemic or other matters that they're not. No. There's not a single open investigation other than - outside of Epstein that has in any way touched on Trump that I'm aware of. None of his business operations have been subject to any congressional oversight by a majority committee.
And the Democrats are writing these letters, and they generally don't even get responses. So the Congress has decided not to commit oversight to this topic, and that's just the fact of the matter at this point.
GROSS: Well, let's take a short break here. Let me reintroduce you. My guest is four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lipton of The New York Times. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with New York Times reporter Eric Lipton. He's been investigating how President Trump and his family have profited from self-enriching White House deal-making, the conflicts of interest these business deals present and the ethical questions they raise. This year, he won his fourth Pulitzer Prize.
One of the things I'm wondering about while interviewing you is, how do you keep all these facts in your head? 'Cause each of the sectors that we've been talking about - the financial schemes and the companies that bought companies that changed their names, that went public and so on - they're - each one of them is so complicated. And it must have taken so much work on the part of you and your fellow reporters. So you do the work. You report it. But now you're still remembering it. How do you do that?
LIPTON: And one of the things, whenever I start one of these stories, is I build a chronology. I mean, it's just like you're working on a term paper in college or high school. I build a really detailed chronology of the sequence of events, and I have as many primary sources with links to the original documents in that chronology. And that becomes my, like, guidepost to this - to the players and the individual actions and the sequence of events. And once you have that chronology, you can see the interplay between what's happening in the government and what's happening in the private sector and who the individuals are.
And the chronology, to some extent, becomes the story because as those different, you know, events are happening and they're intertwined, you kind of - it really - it's like - almost that narrative emerges from the chronology. So for each one of these investigations that I'm doing, I have a master, like, very detailed day-by-day chronology of the events, the players, the companies, the public sector actions, the private sector actions. And in the process of working on this story, I'm basically memorizing that chronology. And I also use the fact-check. Because every single fact has to be so carefully fact-checked because if I make any mistake, believe me, they will pound me, you know, and they will try to undermine the substance of the story based on a small factual error. But if I have that date through a document that's linked to my chronology, then I know that it's accurate. And so those chronologies are really important for me in each one of these investigations.
GROSS: Are they in, like, Word document kind of styles or, like, some kind of spreadsheet?
LIPTON: They're not. I don't keep them in a spreadsheet because they're, like, unpredictable formats and lengths, each entry. So I just basically - everything has a link to a primary - I don't link to secondary sources. I link to primary government documents, our SEC filings, our business, you know, announcements. And it's, like, I love my chronologies because it's - like, it is the spine of the stories right there. And I wait until the story emerges, and it helps me pick my characters and it help me pick my dramatic moments. It helps me pick the - you know, where I want to really drill down and, like, report out a moment that is critical.
Like, for example, the moment that Howard Lutnick meets with the president of Kazakhstan at the St. Regis hotel in October of 2025 to try to bring that tungsten deal. You know, we - my colleague Paul Sonne and I were working on that story and we - and the chronology showed us that this was a moment we really wanted to report out. We - using photographs, we figured out what hotel it was. We then got photos of the room. We figured out what the name of the room was. We got the scene. I found audio of that day because the president of Kazakhstan posted a clip from the meeting he had with Lutnick. And that - like, those were the pieces of the narrative that came together. And that was because the chronology told us, this is a moment we want to pull out.
And that's how I do these investigations, is that, like, I develop the chronology. The chronology tells me, you know - this - as a writer, the chronology is your friend because it's, like, the story happens in a narrative. And there's narrative moments. There's drama that happens at certain narrative moments and you want to pull out that drama. This is - you know, this is nonfiction drama, but you want to let the chronology tell you that story. And that's - and so, I mean - but the - to answer your question as to how do I keep track of all these facts is I have a really solid document that's at the base of each one of these stories.
GROSS: And that can show you, too, the timing of investments versus policy...
LIPTON: Exactly.
GROSS: ...And how intertwined they are.
LIPTON: And I was looking at that time frame of the St. Regis meeting with the first investment that the Trump sons were involved with with that same company, but it was before the public announcement.
GROSS: Before the public announcement.
LIPTON: And that's all in the chronology. And it was - like, only once that's lined up do you see here's what the - here's really the story. And I don't try to start writing a story like this until it's, like - it - I let it kind of emerge to me - like, let the story kind of unfold, and the characters, and the moments and the narrative peaks. I mean, it's all - it's about storytelling. I mean, each one of these stories is basically a backstory. It's like a narrative backstory of how does this deal come together and that we're writing.
GROSS: All right. It's been great to talk with you.
LIPTON: Yeah.
GROSS: And you're actually in the WHYY studio today as opposed to being in Washington, so we get to actually see each other, which has been delightful.
LIPTON: Right, as well (ph).
GROSS: So thank you so much for coming to the studio, thank you so much for this interview and for all the great reporting you've done.
LIPTON: Thank you. It's always great to speak with you. It's one of the best opportunities to have long-form conversations in radio. So I always have a great time talking to you and having an opportunity to really get deep on stories.
GROSS: Eric Lipton is an investigative reporter for The New York Times.
Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, my guest will be writer Claire Vaye Watkins. Like the character in her new novel, Watkins lives in the desert, in an area being developed by an energy company wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. Her previous novel drew on the life of her father, Paul Watkins. He was a teenager when he joined the Manson Family. I hope you'll join us.
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GROSS: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.
FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our senior producer today is Therese Madden. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Anna Bauman, Nico Gonzalez-Wisler and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Susan Nyakundi directed today's show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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