The New York Times published a bombshell new story on former President Donald Trump shortly after 11 p.m. on Friday evening.
“The Trump administration left office without providing the State Department with an accounting of the gifts former President Donald J. Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, and other White House officials received from foreign governments in 2020, the department disclosed late Friday.
The department said that as a result, it could not fully account for the gifts officials received, the latest example to emerge in recent months of how the Trump administration’s flouting of laws and norms about the day-to-day operations of government now makes it harder to determine whether anything improper took place,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Schmidt reported.
Schmidt spoke with Richard Painter, who served as the White House’s senior ethics lawyer under George W. Bush. “It’s flagrant and it looks terrible,” he explained. “Either it was really stupid or really corrupt.”
This is not the first time Trump flouted this particular law.
“The State Department’s inspector general reported in November that tens of thousands of dollars in gifts given to Trump administration officials were missing. They included a 30-year-old Suntory Hibiki bottle of Japanese whiskey given to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, worth $5,800, and a 22-karat-gold commemorative coin valued at $560 given to another State Department official.
The inspector general also found that monogrammed commemorative pewter trays, marble trinket boxes and leather portfolios made with department funds to give to foreign leaders at the Group of 7 summits in 2020 that was canceled because of the pandemic were missing,” The Times reported.