Disgraced ex-President Donald Trump has already been busted for his blatant mishandling of official documents hailing from his White House after the National Archives was forced to physically go to his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort/home to retrieve numerous boxes of top-secret, classified documents he wrongfully packed to the golf resort with him. This was in addition to reports that claimed he burned, flushed, and otherwise destroyed various documents throughout his term that was supposed to be preserved according to the law, and a Feb. 2022 report that revealed multiple documents still remain missing.
But now, according to a new report from CNN, it’s not just documents that Donald Trump and his administration mishandled — as the one-term, twice-impeached former president is now officially under investigation by the House Oversight and Reform Committee for allegedly failing to report or keep up with multiple gifts given to him by foreign officials during his term.
According to the law in the US, when a president receives a gift from a foreign official while in office, that item or object does not actually belong to the individual president, but rather to the United States, and therefore must be tracked and reported. This is to ensure transparency within the US government and help safeguard from bribery in either direction. But, lo and behold, it seems this is yet another US law that the Trump adminsitration did not abide by.
CNN reports, “House Democrats are investigating former President Donald Trump’s ‘apparent failure to account for gifts from foreign government officials while in office’ after learning there may be thousands of dollars-worth of items that are either missing or were not tracked properly, according to a new letter sent to the National Archives by the House Oversight and Reform Committee chairwoman and first obtained by CNN.”
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The committee states in the letter that they receieved information from the State Department that “indicates the Trump administration ‘did not prioritize this obligation’ and failed to comply with the law that governs foreign gift reporting during President Trump’s final year in office.”
“As a result, the foreign sources and monetary value of gifts President Trump received remain unknown,” the letter notes. “The Department of State also stated that it was unable to determine the identities of some government officials who received foreign gifts during the Trump Administration, as well as the sources of those foreign gifts.”
The committee writes that the unaccounted-for gifts “raise concerns about the potential for undue influence over former President Trump by foreign governments, which may have put the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States at risk, and about possible violations of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prohibits the president from obtaining benefits from foreign entities while in office.”
“Public reporting indicates that President Trump accepted multiple gifts from foreign sources in 2020, yet these gifts do not appear on the Department of State’s public list as required by law.”
CNN reports, “The committee has asked the National Archives to provide all applicable documents and communications about the gifts that Trump and his family members received from January 2020 through January 2021 by June 20.”
You can read the full report on the investigation from CNN here.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
