Lawsuit Reminds Trump That Libraries Cannot Be Used As Bribes

MIAMI — A federal lawsuit filed Wednesday asks a district court to determine whether the state of Florida donated a $300 million piece of prime Miami real estate to a former president in the spirit of civic enrichment or whether it just did a crime in eleven minutes and went home. The complaint, submitted in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, argues that a nearly three-acre parcel of land transferred at no cost to Lumpy-Dumb-Dumb's organization violates the Domestic Emoluments Clause of the Constitution — the provision that prohibits a sitting president from accepting gifts from state governments. The clause has been in place since 1787. The board meeting that transferred the land took eleven minutes. One member missed it entirely because he was at a golf tournament in Orlando. The parcel sits across from the Miami Arena, adjacent to the historic Freedom Tower, and had been owned by Miami-Dade College. County records valued it at between $350 and $400 million. The college board voted 5-0 to donate it in a July 2023 meeting that the lawsuit alleges was not properly noticed to the public. The transfer was finalized days after the former president approved a $120 million federal grant to Florida's space industry. "A president may accept his salary and nothing else from a state," said Andres Rivera, an attorney with the Constitutional Accountability Center, which brought the suit alongside a group of Miami residents. "Accepting $400 million in land and calling it a library does not change the legal analysis." Rivera described the sequence of the federal grant followed by the land transfer as "exactly the sort of thing the Framers stayed up late trying to prevent," adding that the Framers had, in fact, written it down. A spokesperson for the presidential library project called the lawsuit a "politically motivated attack on a cultural institution that will house priceless artifacts, including many executive orders the president wrote himself." The spokesperson confirmed the library's main reading room will feature a life-sized bronze statue of the president holding a quill. The quill is decorative. The former president does not use a quill. Plans obtained by reporters include a special exhibit dedicated to the United States Constitution. A preliminary brochure describes it as covering the Constitution "minus the parts that don't apply anymore." The brochure does not specify which parts those are. It does not mention the Emoluments Clause. The lawsuit asks the court to void the land transfer and return the property to Miami-Dade College, which would be required to sell it on the open market. The college board issued a statement saying it looks forward to resolving the matter "in a way that continues to serve the educational mission of our students." A footnote buried in the original transfer agreement defines that educational mission in part as a $0.75 surcharge on every student parking pass sold by the college, in perpetuity, to fund the library's landscaping. The Constitutional Accountability Center did not respond to a question about whether the Framers had anticipated the parking surcharge. Court records indicate they had not.