It was a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, and one of his aides had a delicate question: Wasn’t there going to be a backlash when it became known that the inauguration had spent donors’ money at Trump’s hotel in Washington, even though other places would cost much less or even be free?
“These are events in P. E. ’s honor at his hotel, and one of them is with and for family and close friends, ” Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, then an event planner for Trump, wrote in an email to a colleague in December 2016, referring to Trump as the president-elect and saying she raised the issue to “express my concern. ”
As Trump’s presidency comes to a close, expenditures like those are receiving renewed legal scrutiny in the form of a civil case being pursued by the attorney general for the District of Columbia.
At the heart of the case is a question — whether Trump and his family have profited from his public role, sometimes at the expense of taxpayers, competitors and donors — that has been a persistent theme of his tenure in the White House.
More than 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments patronized Trump’s properties during his presidency while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Sixty of them spent $12 million at his properties during the first two years he was in office.
The Trump family business has received millions of dollars in payments by the Secret Service, the State Department and the U. S. military to Trump properties around the country and the world. The president has visited his properties on at least 417 days since taking office, at times with world leaders. And he and his affiliated political committees spent more than $6. 5 million in campaign funds at his hotels and other businesses since 2017, including a $1 million final burst in the weeks before the election last month.
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