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Congressional investigators are looking for gifts foreign governments gave Trump and his family.
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They include diamond earrings and a soccer ball from Putin, The Washington Post reported.
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The House Oversight Committee has asked whether the gifts were transferred to the National Archives.
Congressional investigators are trying to locate dozens of expensive gifts foreign governments have given to former President Donald Trump and his family, The Washington Post reported, citing three sources familiar with the matter.
The House Oversight Committee has asked the National Archives to check whether the gifts had been transferred to them from the White House after Trump left office, as the law requires, the paper reported.
The gifts include diamond earrings, golf clubs, a large painting of Trump, a gold-plated collar of the Egyptian god Horus, a 2018 World Cup soccer ball from Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a $6,400 collar of King Abdulaziz al Saud from Saudi Arabia, a person familiar with the request told the paper.
The items are worth an estimated $50,000 in total, sources told The Post.
It is unclear why the committee requested to locate these specific items and how far it is in the process of trying to find them, the paper said.
A spokesperson for the committee declined to comment to The Post except to say that the investigation is ongoing.
The Oversight committee launched a probe this summer into whether Trump properly followed the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act, which prevents government officials from keeping gifts from foreign governments with a value of over $415, unless they personally pay for them.
Though there is no specific criminal penalty for improperly retaining the gifts, ethics experts said that it could be warranted depending on the circumstances, per The Post.
“If you have a very valuable item that you are obligated by law to turn over to the federal government and you fail to do that, I don’t know that would preclude a criminal action — we’ve just never seen it done,” Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at CREW, an ethics watchdog organization, told the paper.
Officials are also required to report any gifts from foreign dignitaries valued over $415.
The New York Times previously reported that the Trump administration did not provide information about gifts from foreign governments in 2020, and the State Department said it was unable to compile an accurate list of gifts for that year.
The Trump administration was known to have a history of poor record-keeping practices. The committee has also requested records from Trump’s team about its record-keeping, a Trump advisor told the paper.
This probe comes amid a separate FBI investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents, which culminated in the search of his Mar-a-Lago property that uncovered troves of sensitive and classified documents.
Read the original article on Business Insider
