Documents released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Friday show former President Donald Trump’s hotel in the Old Post Office Building in downtown Washington, D.C., was losing tens of millions of dollars a year while he was in office, despite his public claims to the contrary.
In federally mandated public financial disclosures from 2016 through 2020, Trump reported that the Trump Hotel generated more than $150 million in revenue. In reality, the property accumulated losses in excess of $70 million, according to the committee.
Financial statements show the property incurred net losses of $17.7 million for the fiscal year ending in August 31, 2017; $13.5 million in 2018; $17.8 million in 2019; and $22.3 million in 2020.
The losses forced Trump to pull at least $24 million out of a holding company to boost the struggling property, and, in 2018, obtain favorable terms in a deal with Deutsche Bank that allowed him to delay making payments on a $170 million loan he’d personally guaranteed.
(A Deutsche Bank spokesperson told HuffPost that the committee made “several inaccurate statements” regarding its loan agreement with Trump, but did not elaborate further.)
At the same time, according to an analysis by the committee, foreign governments were spending millions of dollars to rent rooms at the hotel, totaling 7,400 nights from 2017 through 2020 at the average daily rate, bringing in roughly $4 million.
While Trump claimed to have donated the foreign payments to the Treasury, the committee said Friday that the donations represented only a small portion of the actual figures.
Neither the Deutsche Bank deal nor the foreign cash was properly reported, the committee said.
The Constitution’s emoluments clause explicitly prohibits U.S. government and military officials from accepting foreign gifts. While Trump had arguably been in violation of that clause since the day he took office, lawsuits alleging he illegally profited off his presidency were dismissed by the Supreme Court in late January 2021, after he left office.
The documents released Friday further show that Trump lied in his 2011 application to lease the building by failing to give an accurate accounting of his debts. According to the committee, financial statements from 2009 and 2010 provided to General Services Administration concealed hundreds of millions of dollars in debts.
The Trump Organization rents the post office building from the federal government. GSA, which released the documents to the committee, acts as the property’s landlord.
“The documents provided by GSA 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,” the committee chairs said in a statement.
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