Trump And Family Didn’t Report More Than $250,000 In Gifts From Foreign Governments, House Report Says

FOOLS_NIGHTMARE · Mar 20, 2023

Former President Donald Trump and his family members didn’t account for more than 100 gifts in excess of $250,000 given to them by foreign governments, according to multiple reports citing a House Oversight Committee report that found the disclosure failures “were much broader than previously known.”

Former President Donald Trump speaks with reporters and staff on his airplane, known as Trump Force ... [+]

KEY FACTS

Trump, his wife Melania, son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka all received gifts that were not included in required State Department disclosures, the New York Times reported.

The gifts include about $48,000 in items from Saudi Arabian government officials, a $3,040 driver and $460 putter then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave Trump, “a larger-than-life-sized painting” of the former president gifted to him by El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and a $450 decorative box Kushner received from a union activist in Egypt.

Trump and his family relinquished the gifts to the State Department, but failed to publicly disclose them according to reporting requirements for gifts from foreign officials valued at more than $415 that are designed to prevent foreign influence of federal government activity.

KEY BACKGROUND

The House committee launched its investigation last year following a Times report that found the Trump Administration botched the process for turning over gifts to the State Department when he left office. In one example, Trump’s White House relinquished what it believed were white tiger and cheetah furs (that were later determined to be fake) to the wrong agency on his last full day in office. The faux furs were among dozens of lavish, unreported gifts, including swords and daggers, Trump and his associates received on a 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia. The State Department Inspector General also opened a separate probe that found a $5,800 bottle of whiskey given to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo by the government of Japan in 2019 and a $560 gold coin given to another State Department official were missing from the federal government’s archives (a lawyer for Pompeo told Forbes in 2021 his client doesn’t remember receiving the whiskey and isn’t sure of its whereabouts). State Department officials have attributed the mishandling of gifts to shoddy record-keeping and a gift vault that was in “complete disarray” by the time Trump left office.

CHIEF CRITIC

“It’s so much in Donald Trump’s character to violate the entire regime governing gifts from foreign states,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), of the House committee, told the Times.

SURPRISING FACT

The report, released Friday by House Democrats, also speculated whether Trump broke domestic gifting laws when he kept a $6,000 Mac Pro laptop Apple CEO Tim Cook gifted the federal government. The laptop is reportedly missing. “We can’t find it,” Trump aide Desiree Thompson Sayle told former White House ethics lawyer Scott Gast in 2021, according to an email exchange reportedly included in the Oversight report. Trump later listed the computer among the gifts he kept after leaving office. He also reported keeping a $6,400 gold-pendant necklace he received on the trip to Saudi Arabia, though the National Archives told the Times it believes it is now in possession of the jewelry.

TANGENT

The House Oversight Committee, now in Republicans’ control, recent closed a separate examination of how Trump’s hotels may have financially benefitted from his presidency. The committee previously reported that foreign government officials spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of months on stays at Trump’s Washington hotel as they sought to influence Trump’s foreign policy decisions. The committee also revealed in October that the Trump Organization charged Secret Service agents as much as $1,185 per night, nearly five times the typical $240 rate, to stay at Trump International in Washington during 40 hotel trips from 2017 through 2021. Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) told the Times on Monday he is instead opting to use the committee’s resources on investigating “money the Bidens received from China”—likely referring to planned business deals involving President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and brother James.