Lawyer up, Silicon Valley!
If you are one of the tech executives who took a knee for Trump, handed him a gold plaque or a check for his ballroom, and then watched your products come off the tariff list, Democrats get subpoena power in January, and the receipts already exist. Jamie Raskin laid them out a week ago. Trump himself bragged in April about Tim Cook coming to “kiss my ass” in exchange for “BIG HELPS.”
People have argued that these executives were just doing what they had to do in a political environment they didn’t control. As I wrote last month, the people with the least power in this story are the ones who still made the decision the executives would not.
On election night, Robert Garcia, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, offered Trump’s allies a two-word warning: “Lawyer up.” Ed Markey, thinking of Big Tech, said Congress would need “to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing.” Inquiries into corporate donors could begin as early as February. These are the people who run some of the richest companies in human history, and they spent 2025 lining up outside the Oval Office like supplicants at a provincial court.
In January 2025, Meta paid $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over his suspension from Facebook, and X paid $10 million to settle a similar suit. The most powerful communications companies on earth paid a man for the offense of having enforced their own rules against him. In July, Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview, a suit its own lawyers told the court was without merit, while its merger with Skydance sat before the Federal Communications Commission. Three weeks later, the commission approved the merger, after Skydance promised an ombudsman for CBS News and no diversity programs. Brendan Carr, the FCC chairman, says the lawsuit played no part in his review. I take him at his word in the same spirit with which he offered it. A company paid $16 million to make a lawsuit it called worthless go away, and three weeks later it had its merger.
In August, Tim Cook stood in the Oval Office and presented the president with a glass plaque on a 24-karat gold base, along with another $100 billion in investment pledges, the kind of object a courtier commissions when he has run out of dignity to offer. Trump announced a 100 percent tariff on imported chips in the same appearance and explained that for companies like Apple, “there will be no charge.” Days later, the president confirmed that Nvidia and AMD would hand the government 15 percent of their revenue from chip sales to China in exchange for export licenses. “We negotiated a little deal,” he said, crediting Jensen Huang for talking him down from 20. In other words, the head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker haggled over the size of the cut. The Constitution forbids taxes on exports, so the arrangement was called something else. In September, YouTube paid $24.5 million to end Trump’s last platform lawsuit, and $22 million of it went to the Trust for the National Mall to build his ballroom. Google settled a lawsuit by buying a piece of a dance floor.
The ballroom became the collection plate. Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Comcast, and Union Pacific all gave to it, and each had antitrust business pending before the administration when Elizabeth Warren and Dave Min wrote to ask whether the money came with an understanding. Microsoft said a fundraiser had contacted it. Amazon described discussing “potential giving amounts” with the fundraising group starting in August 2025, which is how people talk when they are negotiating a price. Comcast flatly denied expecting anything in return. Meta and Nvidia, by the lawmakers’ account, declined to answer the question. They will find a committee with subpoena power harder to ignore than a letter from the minority.
The defense, when it comes, will be that nobody signed anything. There was no contract stapled to the settlement, no memo attached to the plaque. Every payment had a cover story: a lawsuit resolved, an investment announced, a patriotic gift to a national landmark. People who negotiate every clause of a supplier contract would have us believe that tens of millions of dollars left their companies with no understanding at all of what the money was for.
The Supreme Court has already addressed that defense, and the executives’ lawyers know what it said. In McDonnell v. United States, the 2016 decision that narrowed federal bribery law and vacated a Virginia governor’s conviction, the Court held that a corrupt agreement “need not be explicit.” An official act has to be “specific and focused,” a formal exercise of government power on a pending matter, and a pending merger review, an export license, a tariff exemption and an agency’s decision whether to appeal an antitrust loss are as specific and focused as government power gets. Whether any of these exchanges crossed the legal line is a question for a jury, not for me. What I know is that the payments are already public, and the conversations behind them are not. A subpoena is how Congress gets the conversations.
Some executives may be counting on Trump v. United States, in which the Court gave a former president absolute immunity for his core constitutional powers and at least presumptive immunity for his other official acts. The Court gave it to one man. It shields the president’s conduct and says nothing about the people standing on the other side of the Resolute Desk holding the plaque.
Musk, at least, has been promised something better. On the eve of the election, Trump told the Pod Force One podcast that if Democrats came after Elon Musk, “we’ll have to protect them,” and that he would pardon staff and allies preemptively: “I would not even think about it. I’d do it.” Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars this cycle opposing Democrats, so the offer was not abstract. But a pardon is a stranger instrument than its recipients tend to assume. It reaches only federal crimes. And under a rule the Supreme Court set down in 1896, a witness who has accepted a pardon can no longer invoke the Fifth Amendment for the pardoned offense, because, in the Court’s words, he “stands, with respect to such offense, as if it had never been committed.” A pardoned executive cannot be prosecuted for what he did, and for the same reason he can be compelled to describe it under oath. A pardon cannot cover a crime that has not happened yet, so if he lies to Congress about the old conduct, the lie is a new offense. So the pardon they are counting on is the instrument most likely to put them in a witness chair with nothing left to hide behind.
The general federal statute of limitations is five years. A crime completed in July 2025 can be charged until July 2030. Trump’s term ends in January 2029. These executives have been watching the president’s clock. The one that matters is the statute’s, and it runs well past the inauguration of whoever comes next.
⁂
Last December I wrote about political favor becoming a deal variable, something business reporters priced into mergers as calmly as they priced financing costs. That calm was the most damning part. These executives didn't see what they were doing as corruption. They experienced it as access, and they treated access as a cost of doing business, paid to whoever happened to be selling it. Not one of them felt shame about it then, and I doubt they feel any now.
The executives had shareholders, their defenders say, and the president had leverage, and a fiduciary does not pick fights with the man who controls his export licenses. I understand the argument. I also notice that it is the argument every business makes when it pays a protection racket. It explains the payment without excusing it. A shopkeeper who pays the neighborhood boss at least has the excuse of being a shopkeeper. These executives run companies worth trillions of dollars, held more leverage over this president than almost anyone alive, and spent it on themselves. Fiduciary duty obliges an executive to serve his shareholders. It has never obliged him to purchase a government on their behalf.
I don’t know how many voters had Tim Cook’s plaque in mind on Tuesday, and I won’t pretend the result was a referendum on ballroom donations. What I know is that the voters handed the gavels to the people who have been asking about them for a year, and that those people now have subpoena power, staff, and two years in which to use them.
To the executives who paid: you made a bet that the man selling would also be the man who decided whether the sale was ever examined. For almost two years that bet paid off. On Tuesday, the voters handed the power to examine it to someone else, and the statute of limitations keeps it open to examination until 2030. You knelt for exemptions, licenses, and mergers. Now you can sit before Congress and explain why. Preserve your records and lawyer up, and when your lawyer asks what you understood you were getting, tell him the truth, because a committee is going to ask you the same question, and this time the person asking is not for sale.
Go Deeper into the Circus
Go Back to the Settlers
“Do you support Israel’s right to exist?” is a reactionary, dishonest question. The fact that it gets thrown in your face at nearly any criticism of Israel shows what it’s for. As a matter of argument, it’s a device for changing the subject. You raise settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, where the United Nations Office for the Coordination …
An Oasis in the Desert
Editor’s note: An unedited draft of this essay was inadvertently published on earlier. It contained garbled passages, two misquotations and factual errors, including the wrong dates for Germany’s reactor moratorium and Hong Kong’s national security law. Those errors have been corrected.
As a lawyer, I’d look at it this way: paying to settle a lawsuit is legal, and donating to a public project is legal. What turns either into a crime is a link: a specific outcome the payer intended to achieve, and an understanding that the money transfer was connected to it. Framing a transfer as a settlement or a donation doesn’t make it a safe harbor. Courts look at substance, not labels, and they know the practice of dressing an illegal act up as a legal one well.
So how do you measure that? You look at what was pending when the money moved, and whether the payment makes sense on its own terms. Why pay $16 million to settle a suit your own lawyers called meritless? What were the expected legal fees and reputational costs? How likely were you to lose or recover legal fees? And you look at where the money really went, because routing it to a presidential library or a ballroom doesn’t make it legal.
There are really two tests here. Toward shareholders, executives get wide latitude as long as they act in good faith with a business reason, even for decisions that are legal but shady. Under criminal law, the heart of the issue is intent: did they understand the money was buying a decision? Good faith doesn’t cover paying for an outcome. Personally, I’d argue we should expect more from CEOs paid hundreds of millions, though the law doesn’t set a higher bar. And the facts that point to intent, the emails, board minutes and calls, aren’t public. That’s what subpoenas, and eventually juries, are for.
It could be considered protection money rather than a bribe. The implication was that Trump would try to destroy their businesses if they didn’t pay tribute. It’s like the local mafiosi demanding “protection money” from a local business, instead in this case it’s the president of the United States and major international corporations.