Fordham Law Professor Zephyr Teachout’s 2014 book, about corruption and foreign influence on officials, continues to be referenced following the news that President Donald Trump officially accepted a luxury jetliner as a gift from the Qatari government.
When famed American revolutionary Benjamin Franklin departed his post as ambassador to court of King Louis XVI in 1785, the French sovereign bestowed upon Franklin a lavish gift: a diamond-encrusted snuff box featuring a portrait of the monarch.
Though France was an ally of the then-fledgling United States, and military support from Versailles had been essential to the success of the American revolution two years earlier, Franklin’s present was treated with scrutiny upon his return to North America. There, the newly created US Congress was required to formally approve the exchange as a gift from a foreign government to a public official.
“No one charged the king’s agent with explicit promises or threats,” wrote Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout in the 2014 book Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. “Instead, the worry was that intimate obligations that arise from large gifts could interfere with public commitments.”
Though the USA would rewrite its system of government within a few years of the snuff-box incident, similar anti-corruption language was included in the new constitution: a passage now known as the “emoluments clause” that still holds sway in the modern era.