Former US President Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington received more than $750,000 from foreign officials while the Republican ran the country. The figures are in documents that Trump’s former accounting firm handed over to the US Congress.
The records, released on Monday (14), show that the governments of Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and China spent, between 2017 and 2018, more money on the hotel than previously reported.
The Malaysian prime minister, for example, hired a $1,500 personal trainer during his stay at the hotel in 2017. The Saudi Ministry of Defense rented several suites, costing $10,500 each, and Qatari officials spent more than $10,000. 300,000 in the weeks leading up to a meeting with Trump in 2018.
The documents are being analyzed by an investigative committee of the House of Representatives that investigates the millionaire revenue of Trump’s hotel while he was president. The agency previously estimated that the company had received more than $3.75 million from foreign governments between 2017 and 2020 and hypothesized that the republican may have broken a law that prevents officials from receiving values ​​and gifts from foreign governments.
“This is an extremely worrying picture,” said Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney, chair of the committee. She added that the documents “strongly question the extent to which Trump was guided by his financial interest while in office, rather than the interests of the American people.”
Eric Trump, the former president’s son and responsible for managing the family conglomerate while his father was in the White House, said on Monday that all profits the hotel earned from stays were given to the government.
“As a company, we have made a tremendous effort to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest,” it said in a statement. According to him, the hotel did this “not because of any legal requirement, but because of the respect we have for the office of the Presidency.”
Documents released on Monday show that in September 2017, when Trump met with then-Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, the Malaysian delegation spent at least $259,000 at the Republican’s hotel. Interestingly, at the time, the then American president thanked his counterpart for “all the investment you’ve made in the United States”. Razak, by the way, was already investigated by the Justice Department for corruption.
At the time, the White House denied that Razak was staying at the hotel on orders from the Trump administration.
Also that year, officials from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Trump’s hotel. At the time, Washington was pressuring Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to resume diplomatic ties with Doha.
According to the documents, government officials in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates spent at least $164,000 on Trump’s hotel between late 2017 and mid-2018. , spent at least $307,000.
Records released by House investigators also show a total of $65,139 spent by the American Turkish Council, a non-profit organization linked to the Turkish government.
The council, incidentally, sponsored two conferences held at Trump’s hotel between 2017 and 2019, around the same time Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressured Trump to end an investigation into a Turkish state-owned company. The Turkish Embassy in the US also appears on hotel billing records, but details of contracted services are uncertain.
Last month, the committee also disclosed that the US Secret Service paid more than $1.4 million to Trump hotel properties during Trump’s tenure. According to records, the Trump Organization charged the agency up to $1,185 a night, well above what the government had stipulated.
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