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(Trends Wide) — Donald Trump and his family stopped reporting nearly $300,000 in gifts they received from foreign governments between 2017 and 2020, including a “larger-than-life-size painting” of the former president that may currently be at his Mar-a-Lago residence. , according to a new report by Democrats in the House Oversight Committee and supporting documents obtained by Trends Wide.
More than 100 gifts from foreign officials, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, totaling more than $250,000 in value, were never reported to the State Department by Trump and his family members. immediately as required by law, the report says.
House Democrats say the discovery of these undeclared foreign gifts — including 17 from Saudi Arabia with a total value of more than $48,000 — “raise important questions about why former President Trump failed to disclose these gifts to the public” and whether they could have been used to influence US policy under the previous administration. The report does not provide any specific evidence that US policy has been influenced by freebies.
Jamie Raskin, Rep. from Maryland and the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told Trends Wide that the fact that these items were never reported and that some of them are now missing “suggests serious violations of Clause of foreign emoluments”.
“That part of the Constitution is the original anti-bribery law of the United States,” Raskin said, noting that lawmakers could make criminal filings if there is evidence to justify it.
“But in truth, on a bipartisan basis, Congress needs to legislate to build meaningful enforcement mechanisms into the Emoluments Clause,” he added. “This will force us to recover the wisdom of the architects who were emphatic that people in public office are not exposed to foreign governments.”
House Democrats have sought to point fingers at Trump’s foreign commitments, as fellow Republicans and the new Republican Chairman of the Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, are stepping up their own investigation into the Trump’s foreign dealings. President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
Last year, the State Department disclosed that it could not fully account for foreign gifts received by Trump officials during the president’s final year in office, but the interim report released Friday cites “new information obtained by the commission (which) reveals that the non-disclosure of foreign government gifts was much broader than previously known and extended throughout the Trump administration.”
“Internal White House records obtained by the Commission indicate that the lists provided by the White House to the Office of the Chief of Protocol did not include all foreign gifts received by former President Trump and the First Family not only in 2020, but throughout throughout the Trump administration,” the report states.
“In total, records indicate that former President Trump and the First Family received 117 unreported foreign gifts, valued at approximately $291,000,” the interim report says. The report focuses on undisclosed gifts from Saudi Arabia, Japan, India and China.
“In a legal sense, of course, it makes no difference whether they were completely reckless or deliberately decided to flout the law and the Constitution; but morally, we can safely say that this is precisely the kind of petty minutiae that Donald Trump loves to obsess over,” Raskin told Trends Wide.
Individually, Trump did not report more than 50 foreign gifts, with an estimated total value of more than $150,000, during his time in office, according to House Democrats. As for the foreign gifts he did share with the State Department, Trump disclosed 36 in 2017, 17 in 2018, 23 in 2019 and zero in 2020.
The Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act prohibits a president and federal officials from taking foreign gifts that exceed the minimum value, which is currently set at $415. The law also established a system for how information about foreign gifts is publicly disclosed and allows recipients of items valued above the stated dollar amount the option to purchase and hold them.
Then-President-elect Donald Trump with his children Eric (left), Ivanka and Donald Jr. on January 11, 2017 at Trump Tower in New York. (Credit: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
Some of the gifts Trump received were valued in the tens of thousands of dollars, including a $12,000 Uzbek silk rug and a $35,000 dagger from the emir of Qatar, the report added.
The whereabouts of some of the items are unknown, including a “larger-than-life-size painting” of Trump that was commissioned by the leader of El Salvador and given as a gift just before the 2020 election.
The panel obtained internal communications from the White House, including correspondence about the shipment of the painting from the US Embassy in El Salvador to the US, but found that “there are no records of the disposition of the painting.” .
“NARA had no records of this painting and the GSA [Administración de Servicios Generales] he also had no records of the purchase of this gift,” the report says.
“However, despite GSA transition documents indicating that the Correspondence Manager for the Office of Donald J. Trump certified ‘full compliance with the final disposition of donations’ in April 2021, certain records suggest that the portrait may have been transferred to Florida as ‘property of the former president’ in July 2021,” he adds.
Email exchanges that include photos of the US ambassador to El Salvador standing next to the larger-than-life portrait of Trump indicate that staff were arranging for the State Department to help transfer the gift from the ambassador’s residence to the White House.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, sent the ambassador’s initial email about the painting to White House staff, writing, “Can we take care of this? Very good,” to which a former White House staffer from Trump responded: “Yes, it was forwarded to me and I’m forwarding it to the WH!”
The report lists another item that commission investigators were unable to track down despite reviewing White House, NARA and GSA data, a gift Kushner received from Egypt.
The White House Office of Gifts under the Trump administration requested the National Archives to transfer a number of gifts from its custody to the White House, which included this gift to Kushner. But there are no records pointing to where this gift, a silver-patterned box with an estimated value of $450, is located.
There is also no evidence to suggest that the box is currently in Kushner’s possession.
The panel also found that Kushner, his wife Ivanka Trump and their children together received 33 undeclared gifts, totaling nearly $82,000.
“The commission identified an additional 13 unreported foreign gifts addressed to both former President Trump and former First Lady Melania Trump, totaling more than $22,000 in estimated value,” according to the report.
