Trump vented to Tillerson about law barring US companies from bribing foreign officials: report

By Brandon Carter - 10/06/17 08:26 PM EDT

President Trump reportedly vented to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson about federal laws preventing American businesses from bribing foreign officials, The New Yorker reported Friday.

A source familiar with the exchange told the magazine that Tillerson was visiting the White House in February when Trump brought up the topic in their discussion. ... It’s unclear which part of the law Trump was reportedly complaining about.

According to the report, Tillerson told Trump about an exchange he had with Yemen’s oil minister during his time at ExxonMobil. Tillerson told Trump the Yemeni official offered him a bribe to get Exxon to agree to an oil deal. ... Tillerson said he refused and told the Yemeni official that they’d have to “play straight.” The official said Tillerson used the anecdote to explain to Trump that U.S. businesses don't need to use bribes, but that they “could bring the world up to our own standards,” according to The New Yorker.

The anecdote came in a piece titled "Rex Tillerson at the Breaking Point," looking at the secretary of State amid fresh attention to tensions between him and the president.

A Reporter at Large
October 16, 2017 Issue

Rex Tillerson at the Breaking Point

Will Donald Trump let the Secretary of State do his job?

By Dexter Filkins

....
When Tillerson was sixteen, he started sweeping floors at the university’s engineering school, and began thinking about engineering as a career. He got there by an unusual route. Tillerson, who had played drums in his high-school marching band, won a band scholarship to the University of Texas, where he studied civil engineering. Upon graduation, in 1975, he got a job at Exxon as a production engineer. ... Exxon has historically been dominated by engineers, who pride themselves on their precise, quantifiable judgments. “Rex is what you would expect to get when you cross a Boy Scout with an engineer—straight and meticulous,” Alex Cranberg, an oil executive who went to college with Tillerson, said.
....

In February, a few weeks after Tillerson was confirmed by the Senate, he visited the Oval Office to introduce the President to a potential deputy, but Trump had something else on his mind. He began fulminating about federal laws that prohibit American businesses from bribing officials overseas; the businesses, he said, were being unfairly penalized.

Tillerson disagreed. When he was an executive with Exxon, he told Trump, he once met with senior officials in Yemen to discuss a deal. At the meeting, Yemen’s oil minister handed him his business card. On the back was written an account number at a Swiss bank. “Five million dollars,” the minister told him.

“I don’t do that,” Tillerson said. “Exxon doesn’t do that.” If the Yemenis wanted Exxon on the deal, he said, they’d have to play straight. A month later, the Yemenis assented. “Tillerson told Trump that America didn’t need to pay bribes—that we could bring the world up to our own standards,” a source with knowledge of the exchange told me.
....