A new report released by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that former president Donald Trump accepted foreign payment while in office, filed misleading public disclosures and concealed a massive debt in order to deceive lenders.
According to the disclosures, Trump reported that his downtown Washington hotel brought in $150 million in income while he served in the White House, but the hotel actually incurred more than $70 million in losses.
“By filing these misleading public disclosures, President Trump grossly exaggerated the financial health of the Trump Hotel,” the committee said in a news release Friday, when it unveiled hundreds of pages of documents obtained from the General Services Administration, which leased the federally owned property to Trump’s company beginning in 2013.
The committee also found that when Trump first applied to lease the Old Post Office building in 2011, he provided the federal government with information that “appeared to conceal certain debts,” NBC News reports.
“Records show Trump specifically didn’t show outstanding balances for properties he owned in other major cities like New York, Chicago and Las Vegas, the panel said,” according to NBC News.
“The committee also said the newly obtained documents show that from 2017 through 2020, the Trump International Hotel in D.C. received about $3.7 million in payments from foreign governments, which it said raises ‘concerns about possible violations of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.'”
Top Democrats said that the findings “raise new and troubling questions about former President Trump’s lease with GSA and the agency’s ability to manage the former President’s conflicts of interest during his term in office when he was effectively on both sides of the contract, as landlord and tenant.”
