‘New York Times’ White House correspondent Peter Baker on “Washington Week” told host Jeffrey Goldberg the corruption we’re seeing from the Trump family is nothing compared to Hunter Biden.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG, ‘THE ATLANTIC’ EDITOR, ‘WASHINGTON WEEK’ HOST: Joining me tonight, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Leigh Ann Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent for Puck, and Steven Hayes is the editor of The Dispatch. Thank you for joining me. I want to read you all something from my colleague, David Frum, just wrote about Trump and his relationship to corruption. Quote, nothing like this has ever been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books, discard people, comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African dictatorship. Peter, agree, disagree, is there any precedent for what we’re seeing in American history? PETER BAKER, NEW YORK TIMES WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: No, I mean, there really isn’t. Nothing comes close at this point, no. There have been presidents who have monetized the presidency on some level or another. They used it to benefit their family businesses or whatever. Certainly, there have been family members who tried to trade off their famous presidents. JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That’s more happens more often than not. PETER BAKER: It happens. JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes. PETER BAKER: It happened in the last administration, let’s face it. Hunter Biden certainly traded off his father’s name, but it was penny-ante compared to what we’re talking about now. Even if you believe all the worst allegations against Hunter Biden, it would be a tiny fraction of what we’re seeing now in terms of the scale and scope of these billions of dollars. Literally this cryptocurrency thing alone, his family and businesses have got $ 320 million in fees just in the four months since he started it for creating nothing, by the way. I’m not much of an expert on crypto stuff, but that seems to be you don’t actually have anything. There’s no actual tower at the end of the day. It’s just this coin, and he’s already made hundreds of millions of dollars. So, now, the question is what does that do in terms of policy? That’s the next question. You can certainly make some connections, right? The guy who shows up at this crypto dinner, Justin Sun, just had the SEC say, we’re going to pause our fraud case against him. So, he comes back to the country where he hadn’t been in a couple years after paying tens of millions of dollars for this crypto coin that he’s bought. Is there a direct connection? It doesn’t look good, obviously. And that’s the problem with conflict of interest. Even if you’re doing everything on the up and up, the appearance usually makes most presidents say, let’s not do that because it might give the wrong impression. Trump has no problem with this. JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, you’re giving me the impression that you have not yet purchased the Washington Week meme coin. I’m a little — PETER BAKER: I’m looking for the discount.

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