Raskin Denounces Squires Over Board of Peace Trademark Push (1)

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) slammed US Patent and Trademark Office Director John Squires Tuesday over his efforts to secure intellectual property rights for President Donald Trump‘s Board of Peace initiative.

Squires signed a pair of trademark applications Dec. 30 seeking to register the phrase “Board of Peace” and an associated logo that’s been used by the still-nascent, legally amorphous organization.

Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, interrogated Squires at a March 25 hearing about the unusual applications. He focused on whether there’s a legal basis for the PTO obtaining a trademark as a custodian of the group, which doesn’t have a fixed legal structure and Trump has said he will lead for life.

Raskin said in a letter sent Tuesday and obtained exclusively by Bloomberg Law that Squires’ “incoherent answers” muddled rather than clarified how the the applications came to be, their legality and the status of the Board of Peace itself.

“The basic questions remain,” Raskin said in the letter. “What is the Board of Peace” and why has the agency’s director “chosen to violate essential tenets” of the statute governing trademarks and “standard USPTO operating procedures to personally register its trademark in commerce?”

He argued in the letter that Squires’ filings made him a “straw trademark holder” for the board, in violation of a Lanham Act requirement that an applicant intends and is entitled to use the mark in commerce.

The congressman also referenced reports that the board had received $1.25 billion in taxpayer money, asking if Squires had made himself a “willing accomplice to President Trump’s efforts to cover up that his ‘Board of Peace’ is an attempt to create a secretive private slush fund with billions of U.S. taxpayer and foreign government dollars,” or instead was “an unwitting enabler to this scheme.”

The Patent Office declined to comment.

Authority Disputed

At the hearing, Squires said the applications were meant to deter cybersquatters from laying claim to web addresses associated with the board. The director said his authority to file them came from a provision of 35 US Code § 3 of the Patent Act, and he referenced his “responsibility to advise the president, through the Secretary of Commerce, on matters of national security and all matters of intellectual property,” in response to Raskin’s questions.

The congressman said the authority to provide policy advice was in Section 2 of the act but that it’s “bizarre to think that anyone would read ‘advice on policy issue’ as a blank check to violate governing trademark law.”

The board was first mentioned by Trump in a September announcement about rebuilding Gaza. It held its inaugural meeting in February, and the United Arab Emirates, one of its members, announced at the time it was contributing $1.2 billion in funding to support the group.

Semafor reported in March that the State Department had transferred $1.25 billion initially designated for international disaster relief and peacekeeping for the board, a figure cited in Raskin’s letter.

The genesis of the Squires Board of Peace trademark applications is still unclear.

In the congressional hearing, Squires told Raskin that “the president did not call me” to work on the applications without saying who did.

In a Jan. 9 agency memo, he wrote that he was “grateful to our partners at the White House and GSA for spotting the issue early and trusting the USPTO to handle it the right way.”

In a series of 18 questions at the bottom of Raskin’s letter he asks Squires “Who made the decision that the USPTO would file the two trademark applications”, who was involved in discussion about them, and did the director “prepare the trademark application yourself” or work with an outside organization?

The organization’s executive board includes former UK prime minister Tony Blair, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and real estate developer and Trump confidante Steve Witkoff.

The board’s website includes a terms of service page that references the group’s intellectual property rights without any direct mention of the pending trademark applications. It says that the “Board of Peace logo, name, and all content on this website are the property of the Board of Peace unless otherwise indicated.”