Key Point: “The Trump administration has blurred the lines between family, business and government, with the president conducting diplomacy with the same foreign governments that are negotiating cryptocurrency and real estate deals with his family.”

New York Times: He Asked Tiffany Trump to Marry Him. Then the Deals Started Coming. 

A Times investigation found that Michael Boulos and his family benefited financially from proximity to his in-laws for years.

By Justin Scheck, Tariq Panja, Jo Becker and Bradley Hope

• Michael Boulos was an aspiring businessman, just a few years out of college, when he knelt in the White House Rose Garden in January 2021 and asked President Trump’s daughter Tiffany Trump to marry him.
  
• Almost immediately after she said yes, Mr. Boulos, his family and their associates were benefiting financially from his proximity to his soon-to-be in-laws.
  
• The first deal was a family affair. Mr. Boulos, working for his cousin’s international yacht brokerage, sold his future brother-in-law Jared Kushner on an investment in a roughly 50-meter superyacht.
  
• The second arrangement involved something less tangible: access to the Trumps. 

• Everyone involved denies wrongdoing, and both deals went bad.
  
• The Trump administration has blurred the lines between family, business and government, with the president conducting diplomacy with the same foreign governments that are negotiating cryptocurrency and real estate deals with his family.

• The Bouloses are a variation on that theme. The previously unreported deals — which The New York Times pieced together through contracts, court records, contemporaneous text messages and interviews — show that Mr. Boulos, his family and his associates were in a position to benefit financially as soon as he became engaged to Ms. Trump, the only child of Mr. Trump and his former wife Marla Maples.

• The wedding, held at the president’s Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida, raised the family’s profile and turned the patriarch, Massad Boulos, into an important Trump campaign surrogate.

• Mr. Trump’s election in 2024 propelled Massad Boulos into government. He became a presidential adviser on the Middle East and then a senior State Department adviser on Africa.

• And Michael Boulos is seeking business there, according to the former prime minister of Guinea.

• Mr. Kouyaté said that, as far as he was concerned, the business of Michael Boulos and the political role of his father were inseparable.