The General Services Administration’s Office of Inspector General is now undertaking a formal review of how the agency has handled President Donald Trump’s Washington hotel lease.
“GSA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) is evaluating GSA’s management and administration of the ground lease for the Old Post Office Building,” the agency’s spokeswoman Pamela Dixon told CNN on Tuesday.
The Government Accountability Office is also conducting a review of GSA’s “outleasing program,” which covers the Trump hotel lease.
“Our review will be looking generally at the GSA outleasing program. We expect that it will cover a wide range of issues and leases,” explained GAO spokeswoman Jennifer Ashley in a statement to CNN Wednesday. “But the work is not focused on any one lease.”
Of all the ethical and legal land mines posed by Trump’s financial holdings, none has posed more uproar than the hotel he opened in the Old Post Office in Washington — just blocks away from the White House and a regular watering hole for Cabinet members, lobbyists and the President himself.
The Trump Organization leased the property from GSA in 2013, but a clause in the lease states that no “elected official of the government … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom,” leading some outside ethics watchdogs to call foul.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and American Oversight have previously sued for GSA lease documents and called for the GSA IG to investigate the hotel lease — to no avail, until now.
“The terms of the GSA’s lease with the Trump Organization specifically forbid any elected official from benefiting from this property and no one — not even the President — is above the law,” American Oversight senior adviser Melanie Sloan said in a statement Tuesday. “We’re glad the GSA’s Inspector General is taking a long-overdue look at the murky circumstances surrounding this lease.”
Federal News Radio first reported the inspector general’s evaluation.
The scope of the IG’s investigation is not entirely clear and requests for additional information were not immediately returned.
The GSA concluded in March that the Trump organization was in compliance with the lease requirements, despite red flags from ethics experts.
Before Trump was sworn in, he transferred operational control of his vast business holdings to his sons and a Trump Organization executive, but he is the beneficiary of the trust that was established.
