Trump keeps facing queries on payments to his hotel

WASHINGTON » 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 presidentelect and saying she raised the issue to “express my concern.”

As Trump’s presidency comes to a close, expenditures such as 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, specialinterest 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.

In the lawsuit moving forward, Attorney General Karl A. Racine of Washington is arguing that Trump’s inaugural committee illegally overpaid his family business by as much as $ 1.1 million for events held at the Trump International Hotel in the city in January 2017. Ivanka Trump was deposed in the case last week.

Questions about spending, influence and lobbying around the 2017 inaugural have also drawn scrutiny from federal prosecutors from two different offices in New York, with charges filed against at least one donor.

But for all the attention focused on the issue, Trump is set to leave office without a clear resolution of what limits there should be on a president’s ability to profit from his public role.

Lawsuits brought by nonprofit groups and attorneys general in Washington and Maryland claiming that Trump had violated the so- called emoluments clause of the Constitution were never resolved during his term and now face potential dismissal once he is out of power.

“It is more than just frustrating,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, who has been involved in the emoluments litigation. “The most serious questions about the abuse of presidential power and the use of the presidency as a center of personal gain and profit remain unresolved. The wheels of justice clearly ground more slowly than some would have hoped.”

The issue played out especially visibly at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which opened in late October 2016, two weeks before Trump was elected.

The case Racine is pursuing is moving ahead after he spent several years collecting evidence about the arrangements between the presidential inaugural committee and the hotel.

Trump’s inauguration was unlike any other in U. S. history: He raised more than $ 107 million, twice the previous record.

But when the hotel initially asked the inaugural committee to pay $ 450,000 a day to rent the ballrooms and other common spaces, it provoked immediate questions from both Wolkoff, who has since broken with the Trump family, and Rick Gates, then the inaugural committee’s deputy chair, who would go on to plead guilty to charges stemming from the special counsel’s investigation.

Trump later wrote to Mickael C. Damelincourt, the hotel’s general manager, and asked him to call Gates to negotiate a better deal for the inaugural committee.

Wolkoff will be questioned under oath this week and Gates this month. Ivanka Trump, questioned for five hours last week about the matter, condemned the inquiry, as did her brother Eric Trump, who oversees operations at the hotel.