House Oversight launches investigation into unreported gifts received by Trump
House Oversight Committee Democrats have launched an investigation into the gifts former President Trump received while he was in office, claiming he failed to account for thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts he received from foreign officials.
According to the committee, the former president appears to have flouted laws that require turning over any gift deemed to be worth more than $415 — a longstanding practice based on the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which places limits on what the president can receive from foreign governments.
“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,” Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to the National Archives.
“These revelations 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,” she added.
The request comes following an April report in The New York Times detailing how the State Department was unable to track many of the gifts Trump and others in the administration received during their final full year in office.
State Department officials have since told the committee that its gift vault was left in “complete disarray” by the Trump administration.
Yet some of the gifts the prior administration failed to turn over were covered in media reports of its overseas trips. On a trip to India alone, Trump received a bust of Mahatma Gandhi, a marble replica of Gandhi’s “Three Monkeys” statue and a spinning wheel, along with other gifts.
The Department of State Office of Inspector General has previously documented issues with Trump administration record-keeping of its gifts, writing in a report last year that a “lack of accurate recordkeeping and appropriate physical security controls contributed to the loss” of various gifts.
That left them unable to determine what happened to a rare $5,800 bottle of whiskey given to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2019 as well as a 22-karat gold commemorative coin given to another State Department official.
The letter to the National Archives indicates that it may have records “not available to the State Department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol.”
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