CNN
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President Donald Trump said Sunday night that the Defense Department plans to accept a Boeing 747-8 jet to replace Air Force One as a “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE.”
CNN reported earlier Sunday that the Trump administration was set to accept a luxury plane from the Qatari royal family that will be retrofitted and used as Air Force One during the president’s second term, according to two people familiar with the agreement.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the multimillion dollar jet would be used on a temporary basis “in a very public and transparent transaction.”
Trump is set to embark Monday on his first major foreign trip, which includes a stop in Doha, Qatar.
Given the massive value of a Boeing 747-8, the move is unprecedented and raises substantial ethical and legal questions. A Qatari official said the plane is technically being gifted from the Qatari Ministry of Defense to the Pentagon, describing it more as a government-to-government transaction instead of a personal one. The Defense Department will then retrofit the plane for the president’s use with security features and modifications.
The plan is for the plane to eventually be donated to Trump’s presidential library after he leaves office, ensuring he can continue to use it, according to a person familiar.
“The possible transfer of an aircraft for temporary use as Air Force One is currently under consideration between Qatar’s Ministry of Defense and the US Department of Defense, but the matter remains under review by the respective legal departments, and no decision has been made,” Ali Al-Ansari, Qatar’s media attaché to the US, said Sunday.
Within the Secret Service, the potential gifting of a plane by a foreign government for presidential use is being viewed as a “security nightmare,” a law enforcement source told CNN.
“The (US Air Force) would have to tear it apart looking for surveillance equipment and inspect the integrity of the plane,” the source said.
Another source familiar with that process said it will begin with the White House Communications Agency, which will then ask the CIA and National Security Agency to conduct a technical countermeasures sweep.
Democrats quickly condemned the news Sunday, with the Democratic National Committee describing it in a news release as “Trump’s latest grift.”
“Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a statement. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with extra legroom.”
Trump cast aside that criticism from Democrats in his Truth Social post on Sunday, but the expected move has drawn rebuke from at least one of his most loyal supporters, Laura Loomer, a far-right provocateur who met with the president in the Oval Office earlier this spring. While Loomer said she would “take a bullet” for the president, she criticized Trump, arguing that accepting the plane would be a “stain” on the administration “if this is true.”
ABC News first reported on the new plane.
Trump and aides toured the plane earlier this year at the airport in Palm Beach, Florida, and it is expected to be in use within two years, one person told CNN.
Following his tour, Trump has boasted to people around him about how luxurious the plane was.
“President Trump is touring a new Boeing plane to checkout the new hardware/technology,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement at the time.
The news comes as government watchdog groups have bristled at how publicly the president is flaunting the norms of the office.
Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the potential move is a sharp departure from the playbook presidents have followed to ensure they stay in line with the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, which bans foreign payments to a sitting US president.
“We’ve never seen something on the level of a $400 million plane,” he said. “It is a scale well beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.”
Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said that the Trump administration is “structuring a transaction to try to avoid the obvious application of the law” and that because Congress has not consented to the gift, it violates the clause.
“It is ridiculous. It’s a gift to Trump. The federal government is a pass-through,” Clark added.
During Trump’s first term, legal disputes arose concerning whether he had violated the emoluments clause by illegally profiting from his business ventures while in public office, Clark noted. In 2021, the Supreme Court dismissed the cases against Trump because he was no longer in office.
“Trump thinks he will get away with this $400 million payoff from Qatar because he got away with multiple emoluments clause violations in his first term, and neither Congress nor the court would enforce the Constitution’s anti-corruption clause,” Clark said.
Replacing the Air Force One aircraft has long been a priority for Trump. Boeing has been working toward renovating two 747 jets into next-generation Air Force One aircraft, but the process has been wracked by delays. The planes had been scheduled to be delivered by 2022 and now aren’t expected until at least 2027.
Cheung said earlier this year that Trump’s tour of the plane in Palm Beach “highlights the project’s failure to deliver a new Air Force One on time as promised, as they are already 5 years late.”
Boeing’s $3.9 billion contract to replace the two Air Force One jets has become an expensive and embarrassing albatross. The company has already reported losses totaling $2.5 billion already on the program, known as VC-25B, since it agreed to be responsible for what has become soaring cost overruns.
The two jets currently in use, which have the code letters VC-25A and carry the Air Force One designation when the president is on board, have been in service for nearly 35 years, starting during the term of President George H.W. Bush.
Trump has been deeply frustrated by the delays in replacing the aircraft, at one point tapping Elon Musk to help accelerate the process.
“I’m not happy with the fact that it’s taken so long,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One in February. “There’s no excuse for it.” He said he wouldn’t turn to Boeing’s European rival, Airbus, but would consider buying a used 747 and having a different company refurbish it for use as Air Force One.
The challenge is not the basic jet, but what it takes to turn a run-of-the-mill Boeing 747 into the flying communications and command post fit for the president of the United States, Richard Aboulafia, managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory, an aerospace consulting firm, previously told CNN. They are supposed to be able to protect its occupants from missile attacks or even the shock waves of a nuclear blast.
“You can have a jet anytime,” he said. “But it takes a great deal of work to have encrypted communications and manage the military and federal government from anywhere around the world in any circumstance.”
The Qatari Boeing 747 aircraft has been in San Antonio, Texas, for the past month, according to a person familiar.
This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, Betsy Klein, Kylie Atwood, Chris Isidore, Josh Campbell and Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.
