Ranking Member Raskin's Statement at Hearing on US Patent Office

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I'll be somewhere in between the chairman of the full committee and the distinguished chairman of the subcommittee. Thank you, Director Squires, for joining us today. As head of the PTO, your job is to promote stability in the market for goods and services by protecting trademarks that are used in interstate commerce. In pursuit of the mission, the USPTO has for decades been removed from political intrigue, favoritism, and controversy by keeping politics out. Prior presidents and USPTO directors ensured that applicants had a fair and honest system to rely on. It seemed to change last year. You and President Trump injected partisan politics into the work of the PTO, from working to strip trademark examiners of any right to collective bargaining, a right that they'd enjoyed for many decades, and firing the members of the patent and trademark oversight bodies, to refusing to respond to congressional requests for information. Your tenure seems to be threatening the traditional integrity and non-political nature of our system. You recently took an extraordinary and unprecedented action. Earlier this year, the USPTO itself filed trademark applications on behalf of Donald Trump's ill-defined private multi-billion dollar global project called the Board of Peace. President Trump has declared himself chairman for life of this elusive entity. He's promised billions of dollars from the taxpayers to the board, although Congress has not voted a single dollar for it. And he has secured billions of dollars from mostly corrupt foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Uzbekistan, and Kuwait. Beyond that, there's not much we know about this shadowy venture. We don't know its basic corporate structure. We don't know whether it's a registered entity anywhere in the United States or in any other country. We don't know who controls the billions of dollars in its bank accounts. We don't know what countries those bank accounts are located in. We don't know who will conduct audits and oversight of the board, if anyone. And we don't know what the president intends to do with this massive, secret, unaccountable slush fund while he's in office and after he leaves. Yet, when the Board of Peace decided it wanted to secure a trademark for its name and for its logo, a move that should have required it to identify the legal entity that actually runs it and controls its billions of dollars, you stepped in. You personally filed the trademark applications allowing USPTO to stand in as a straw trademark holder to cover up for this slush fund that appears to put both billions of US taxpayer funds and billions in payments from foreign governments into the pocket of the chairman for life, Donald Trump, who will control it. The president set up a board that likely violates both the foreign and the domestic emoluments clauses, and now you're helping to run the operation, as far as we can tell. What's more, I'm not sure that either you or the Trump administration realize what you're confessing by filing a trademark application. You're admitting that the Board of Peace is not a legitimate governmental body, but rather a commercial enterprise set up by President Trump. Our trademark law began in 1879 when the Supreme Court struck down a trademark law that applied to any and all organizational designations. The court ruled that Congress could do so only under the Commerce Clause. So when Congress passed the Trademark Act of 1881, it was written to apply only to marks used in interstate commerce. The modern version of the Lanham Act in 1946 makes clear it only protects trademarks used in interstate commerce. Section 1052B specifically forbids the registration of any insignia of the United States or any state or municipality or any foreign nation or any other governmental body. So by filing for a trademark, you're admitting that the Board of Peace is not really a governmental entity at all. It's a purveyor of influence operating for profit with apparently a billion dollar admission fee. At least that's what's been reported in the press. A money laundering scheme to pocket the billions all made in a global shakedown in the name of peace. Now as far as I can tell, the USPTO has just nine trademarks. Four are various logos for your office, some of which read USPTO. Others have the full name of the agency written out. IS Patent and Trade Office. Three more are for the phrases go for real and you're smart by smart. Phrases that were part of a public awareness campaign that the USPTO itself ran with the National Crime Prevention Council. The other two are now for the mysterious Board of Peace, which has no organizational relationship, I believe, whatsoever to the USPTO. So by agreeing to act as President Trump's phone friend and using the PTO to register a trademark on behalf of a third party, it would seem you're violating a cardinal principle of the Lanham Act, which explicitly lays out in subsection b that only quote a person who has a bona fide intention under circumstances showing the good faith of such person to use a trademark in commerce who may request registration of the trademark. That's a problem for the agency whose role it is to administer and police the registration of trademarks and to administer disputes about them. One can only imagine this decision will get challenged and there will be litigation over the mark that you have now claimed as your own for the PTO before your agency, which is charged with being the neutral adjudicator of disputes about trademarks. The only reason anyone ever registers a trademark is to prevent competing uses. Why would the Trump administration tell you to file for this registration except to suppress anyone else's trademark related to the word peace? The field is crowded with existing registrations by other educational pervasion purveyors of global peace. To give a few examples I've found online this morning, World Peace Table, World Peace Network, Project Peace, Peace Vision Global, Global Peace Initiative, Global Peace Foundation, International Peace Center, Peace Network, Peace Action, the Peace Trust, Greenpeace. Any one of these organizations would have a strong case to sue for cancellation of Trump's Board of Peace trademark on the grounds that it dilutes and infringes their own pre-existing trademarks for peace facilitation services and also of course that this mark is not registrable at all since it purports to identify a governmental entity and not an organization in interstate commerce. Not only would you have to decide whether Trump has a defense to prior users' opposition to his marks, you would have to rule on any offensive use of trademark law by Trump against any of the other groups. Let's say he moves to attack Greenpeace for infringement of his commercial trademark or opposes registration of any new organization that uses peace in its name. Who would adjudicate this? You would, your office. You're both the owner and you're the judge of any rights that you have as an owner against anyone who wants to identify their organization with the word peace. This is not just a disreputable use of the trademark registration process. It's the first step in giving Donald Trump and his subordinates a monopoly on use of the word peace to make the very notion of peace unthinkable if it departs from control of the new big brother who now owns it. If President Trump can't win the Nobel Peace Prize he craves because he plunged us into an aggressive war of choice in the Middle East, now he'll just own the word peace instead. I wrote to last week Director Squires asking about this elusive entity, an unprecedented baffling situation. If there's a reasonable explanation for the USPTO's conduct here we'd like to hear it today because if you simply filed on behalf of the Board of Peace as a favor to the president then that's a serious problem. A decision like that doesn't just drag the USPTO into covering up for a slush fund that may violate both the foreign and domestic emoluments clauses. It's bad for the integrity of our trademark laws. When people lose faith in the fairness and objectivity of our system it begins to fall apart. So I'm not just troubled that you may be violating the basic trademark rules, I'm troubled that in violating the rules to help Donald Trump you may be acting as a political operative in a way that will destroy our neutral system for regulating source identifying trademark rights. The trademark system is designed to protect everyone. If applicants think that the rules change for the wealthy and the politically well-connected they're much less likely to believe the system can work for them. I look forward today to finding out how you justify your agency registering a commercial mark for this alleged governmental entity, if that's what it is, how you intend to resolve disputes with the dozens of past and future registrants of peace organizations and what you intend to do to restore the professional non-partisan reputation of the USPTO. Thank you Mr. Chairman, I yield back.