The Champagne will keep flowing for another six months at two of President Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf courses, despite his felony conviction. For now, though, the Trump Organization is barred from touching the proceeds.
Officials with the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office said Tuesday that they have issued temporary, half-year extensions for the liquor licenses at the Trump National Golf Club in Colts Neck and the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster.
The last-minute extensions were necessary to keep the drinks flowing while state officials continue to review Trump’s application to renew the licenses for the coming year.
Without the extension, the licenses at the Colts Neck and Bedminster clubs would have expired outright on Monday, June 30.
But the extensions come with heavy strings attached — including that Trump, as a convicted felon, and any other corporate members of the clubs’ LLCs must keep their hands out of the bar tills at the two clubs indefinitely.
The attorney general’s Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control is requiring that proceeds from the two clubs’ liquor licenses be held in untouched accounts kept separate from those for the clubs’ other income.
It’s a constraint that Peter Rhodes — a lawyer who’s specialized for 30 years in New Jersey liquor licensing — says he’s never seen imposed.
Usually, when a license owner or beneficiary becomes a felon, they are simply given time to walk away from the license, Rhodes said, usually by selling or transferring their interest to a non-felon.
“One might infer that the ABC is struggling with how to handle this issue — with how to deprive a felon of the proceeds of their license,” he told BI.
“In short, I find it peculiar,” said Rhodes, whose Haddonfield-based firm, Cahill, Wilinski, Rhodes & Joyce, has served for 50 years as counsel to the New Jersey Licensed Beverage Association.
“What they don’t say is what happens to that money if, in fact, they find that he is disqualified,” Rhodes added. “They can’t just confiscate it.”
A spokesperson for New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin told Business Insider that the special conditions “are consistent with the division’s obligation to ensure that all liquor licensees comply with the law.”
“New Jersey statutes state that profiting from a liquor license is a privilege, not a right granted by law,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
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It was soon after Trump’s May 30, 2024, conviction that New Jersey officials first said that the two golf club licenses were under review.
In June of 2024, they announced that they did not intend to renew the licenses due to Trump’s new status as a felon.
Both the Bedminster and Colts Neck licenses are in the name of Donald Trump, Jr., the president’s son, but the state AG’s office ruled at the time that Trump himself is the primary beneficiary of the clubs’ liquor sales.
A license-revocation hearing — at which Trump would bear the burden of proving he was qualified to be a license beneficiary — was initially set for July 2024, only to be repeatedly canceled. A new hearing date has yet to be announced.
New Jersey law requires liquor licenses be revoked if their owner or primary beneficiary is sentenced for a crime of moral turpitude, a category which includes felony falsifying business records. That’s the state charge Trump was sentenced to in Manhattan in January, nine days before his inauguration.
This week’s license extension further requires that by September 30, the Trump Organization provide the alcoholic beverage control officials with details of “the corporate structure, ownership, and beneficiary interests” behind the licenses.
Trump’s third New Jersey golf club is the Trump National Golf Club Philadelphia, which is 45 minutes from that city in Pine Hill. The town, not the state, regulates that license, which was also due to expire June 30.
Officials in Pine Hill and a food and beverage manager at the golf club there did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The chief legal officer of the Trump Organization also did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the license renewals and the required special conditions.
