An investigation of the Washington Post revealed that US President Donald Trump has obtained several million dollars from the government and its electoral campaign for the use of its properties for some events, including some state dinners, in an apparent and significant conflict of interest. Until now it was known that Trump preferred to use his own facilities for high-level political and institutional events, but the revenue that these events provided to Trump himself was unknown. According to Washington Post Trump earned at least 8.1 million dollars in this way in his four years as president: but the information about it is so little that it could be much more.
During his presidency, Trump has so far visited his hotels and private clubs at least 280 times: most of the time for private reasons – during which, however, his presence attracted considerable interest and attention – but it has happened that in its spaces held dinners with prominent heads of state, party fundraisers, and other high-level public events.
It was during these occasions that the companies owning the structures, which still refer to Trump today, made the government pay all kinds of expenses including “hotel rooms, conference rooms, apartments, cottages, golf carts, votive candles, candelabra, palm trees. decorations, steaks, chocolate cakes, bottles of wine and a thousand dollars of liquor for a drink among collaborators of the White House “, writes the Washington Post.
In April 2018, for example, Trump hosted a state meeting with then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his private club in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. According to documents obtained from the Washington Post, the club charged the government $ 13,700 for hotel rooms for both staff, $ 16,500 for catering, and $ 6,000 for the flowers that decorated the rooms. A year earlier, during another state visit to Mar-a-Lago with Chinese President Xi Jinping, a group of White House employees held a meeting in a bar of the facility: after kicking out the bartender “to speak confidentially The facility’s catering manager then let it be known, they served alcohol worth a total of a thousand dollars, which they put into the government’s account.
In all, the companies attributable to Trump have obtained at least 2.5 million dollars from the US government and at least 5.6 million dollars from the Trump election committee, which especially in recent months has organized several electoral events in the structures of the owner and president. . “However, many expenses remain unknown”, explains the Washington Post, “given that several federal agencies including the White House itself and the State Department have not released their data.”
The White House did not comment on the article from the Washington Post, but a few months ago Eric Trump – son of the president, as well as his close associate – had spoken about the matter during an interview with Yahoo Finance explaining that “if my father stays in one of our properties, he does it for free, except for the necessary cleaning costs.” That’s not the case at all, he discovered Washington Post: “In the cases we’ve looked at where rooms have been paid for, the Trump Organization appears to have charged the government the maximum amount allowed by federal law, and in some cases even more.” In Mar-a-Lago, Trump charged his government between $ 396.15 and $ 650 per night for the accommodations needed during his visit. The Washington Post speaks of similar figures for two other properties in Bedminster, New Jersey, and the Trump Hotel in Vancouver, Canada.
As emerged from the investigation by Washington Post, Trump also got money from his electoral committee: from September 1 to October 14, for example, Trump’s hotels got $ 800,000 from his election committee for catering expenses alone.
It is unclear whether the findings of the Washington Post will lead to a conflict of interest investigation into Trump. At the moment, when they are missing a few days to the presidential election, the news was picked up by some newspapers but soon slipped far behind in the schedules, overtaken by the latest developments in the electoral campaign.
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