Sell what? They're leasing. Sell their lease? Is that possible?
The House Transportation Committee issued a subpoena to the General Services Administration on Thursday seeking financial records and other information regarding President Trump’s D.C. hotel.
The Trump International Hotel operates in the federally owned Old Post Office Pavilion, on a lease that Trump signed in 2013 when he was still with his company, which has become the center of lawsuits and conflict-of-interest concerns since he took office.
According to a copy of the subpoena, sent by committee Chairman Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) to GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, the committee is seeking any communications between the GSA and President Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump or Eric Trump, as well as monthly financial records that the Trump Organization provides to the agency.
Ivanka Trump managed the project for her father before he entered politics. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are running the company while Trump is president.
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“How do we know what the income is? How do we know how GSA is calculating the profits?” DeFazio said in the hearing. “We don’t know whether we are getting a damn penny out of this thing or not.”
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Under the lease, Trump’s company is required to pay the federal government a base rent of $3 million plus additional payments if the hotel’s revenue meets certain benchmarks.
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At a hearing last month, Dan Mathews, head of the GSA’s Public Buildings Service Commission, testified last year that the agency received just the base rent, indicating that the hotel had not hit benchmarks that required sharing revenue with the government.
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A central focus of redeveloping the Old Post Office was generating revenue for the government. How much revenue the hotel has actually received remains unknown to the public and to the committee because, under the Trump administration, the GSA has not been willing to provide that information.
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The Transportation Committee’s subpoena also seeks legal memos regarding the GMA’s decision to allow the lease to remain in place despite a passage in it barring elected officials from benefiting from it and the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars the president from accepting gifts or payments from foreign or domestic governments.
Government officials from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and other nations have booked business at the hotel, and a report earlier this year from the agency’s inspector general said the GSA “improperly” ignored constitutional concerns in managing the project.
WaPo
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