Democrats in the House of Representatives alleged on Friday that former President Donald Trump failed to report $300,000 worth of gifts from foreign governments.
The hundreds of thousands in presents received by Trump and his family between 2017 and 2020 included a “larger-than-life-sized painting” of the former president that Democrats asserted was at Mar-a-Lago, the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee said in a report, according to CNN.
The document details over 100 gifts given to Trump and his family from foreign governments and leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Among the unreported gifts are 17 items from Saudi Arabia worth over $48,000. The total value of the objects, worth over a quarter of a million dollars, by law should have been disclosed to the State Department by the former president. But they weren’t, according to the report.
Democrats on the committee charged that the finding “raises significant questions about why former President Trump failed to disclose these gifts to the public” and alleged that the gifts could have been used to influence Trump administration policies.
The Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act prevents a sitting president and federal officials from keeping gifts from foreign governments that are over the value of $415. The law also mandates the public disclosure of foreign gifts and allows for the recipients to purchase them.
In late 2022, the State Department said it could not account for some of the foreign gifts Trump officials were given during the administration’s last year.
Friday’s report made use of “new information obtained by the committee [that] reveals that the failures to disclose gifts from foreign governments were much broader than previously known and extended throughout the Trump Administration.”
“Internal White House records obtained by the Committee indicate that the listings provided by the White House to the Office of the Chief of Protocol failed to include all the foreign gifts received by former President Trump and the First Family not only in 2020, but throughout the Trump Administration,” the report said.
The report cited undisclosed gifts from China, Saudi Arabia, India and Japan. Trump received some high value items during his term, including a $35,000 dagger and $12,000 Uzbek silk carpet from the Emir of Qatar, the report said.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)