President Donald Trump lost more than $73 million on his luxury D.C. hotel even while claiming multi-million profits on his disclosure forms, the House Oversight Panel says after reviewing government documents.
The hotel, which the Trump Organization refurbished and leases from the federal government, was a fixture of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and became a hub of activity for supporters during his administration.
But far from being a revenue-generator, it was a 'failing business saddled by debt,' according to a letter the Democratic-run Oversight panel wrote to the General Services Administration, known as the nation's landlord.
'Taken together, these documents show that far from being a successful investment, the Trump Hotel was a failing business saddled by debt that required bailouts from President Trump’s other businesses,' panel chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) wrote.
'In deciding to conceal the Trump Hotel’s true financial condition from federal ethics officials and the American public, President Trump hid conflicts of interest stemming not just from his ownership of the hotel but also from his roles as the hotel’s lender and the guarantor of its third-party loans.'
Trump's luxury hotel in Washington, D.C. lost more than $73 million over the four years he was in office, rather than raking in millions as public financial disclosures claim, according to the House Oversight Committee
The panel found that Trump 'provided misleading information about the financial situation of the Trump Hotel in his annual financial disclosures; received undisclosed preferential treatment from a foreign bank on a $170 million loan to the hotel that the President personally guaranteed; accepted millions of dollars in emoluments from foreign governments without providing an accounting of the money’s source or purpose; concealed hundreds of millions of dollars in debts from GSA when bidding on the Old Post Office Building lease; and made it impossible for GSA to properly enforce the lease’s conflict-of-interest restrictions by engaging in opaque transactions with other affiliated entities,' according to the letter.
The letter charges that Trump 'hid' the losses from the public by failing to disclose them.
But the letter does not charge that Trump necessarily violated the law.
'While the Committee did not draw a conclusion about whether President Trump’s federally mandated disclosures were in technical compliance with reporting requirements, it is clear that the disclosures failed to provide the public with an accurate picture of President Trump’s businesses, their financial health, and the nature and extent of the conflicts of interest they posed,' Maloney writes.
Instead, it says, 'By portraying the hotel as a successful business, President Trump concealed significant ethical issues stemming from his failing business. The hotel’s massive losses decreased President Trump’s personal net worth, compromised the hotel’s ability to repay loans from other entities owned by the President, and potentially jeopardized his other personal assets due to the personal guarantee he provided for the Trump Hotel’s $170 million debt.'
According to data compiled by the committee based on Trump Hotel financial statements from Trump's accountant, the hotel lost between $2.5 million and $22 million each year, losing $73 million over the period.
The money-losing state of the hotel follows a report that Trump has tumbled out of the ultra-exclusive Forbes 400 list of America's richest people for the first time since making it on in 1996, worth $400 million shy of this year's cutoff, the outlet revealed Tuesday.
The former president is worth $2.5 billion, according to Forbes, after he lost $600 million of his fortune during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump was ranked 339th last year. His highest ever position was at 71st in 2003, the year before he launched his NBC hit series The Apprentice.
But in March 2020, three years after Trump refused to divest from his name-brand real estate holdings, the coronavirus pandemic upended the economy.
Divesting when he took office in 2017 would have been an opportunity to diversify his assets, Forbes argues.
Even if he divested and paid maximum capital gains tax, investing the rest into wider portfolios like the S&P 500 could have left him 80 percent richer than he is today.
Instead, his narrow wealth portfolio was dealt a blow by the pandemic's particularly powerful impact on tourism and hospitality, as well as big city real estate prices.
