The Trump family is in talks to reacquire their Washington D.C. hotel, which could reveal how the president-elect is set to handle issues related to possible conflicts of interest.
This week, Eric Trump met at Mar-a-Lago with a bank executive from BDT & MSD, which is in control of the lease on the building, people familiar with the meeting told The Wall Street Journal.
Eric Trump is an executive vice president at the president-elect’s real estate company, and he discussed possibly buying the lease. What was the Trump International Hotel at the Old Post Office building is now the Waldorf Astoria. The building is owned by the federal government and was leased to the Trump family.
Trump opened the hotel the same year that he was initially elected to the presidency in 2016. He sold the lease in 2022 for $375 million.
The family company is now looking to operate a hotel in the nation’s capital as Trump once again prepares to enter the White House. The family is still interested in the Old Post Office Building, according to The Journal.
Getting the rights to the hotel back could cost more than $300 million, the paper noted.
Democrats argued during his first term that Trump’s stake in the hotel violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause, a constitutional provision forbidding a president from receiving things of value from foreign or state governments. Critics argued that this would also apply to foreign officials spending large amounts of money on Trump hotel rooms, the hotel’s restaurant, and room service.
At the time, The Trump Organization said that it didn’t market the hotel to foreign officials and that it handed a check to the Treasury Department for the funds made from guests representing foreign governments. But the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia still filed lawsuits in connection to the emoluments clause.
The Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2021 after President Joe Biden entered office. If the Trumps reacquire the hotel, similar conflicts of interest claims will likely be made once more.
The Trump Organization issued an ethics pledge for the second term of Donald Trump on Friday, which included appointing an outside lawyer and restricting Trump’s access to specific financial information. But ethics lawyers said the measures were insufficient, according to The New York Times.
The measures are mostly similar to those put in place eight years ago. The outside attorney is to review family business transactions above $10 million and assets owned by Trump will be kept in a trust.
But unlike eight years previously, the Trumps are not committing to stopping any new international real estate agreements. But it is agreeing to conduct “no new transactions with foreign governments.”
“We are going above and beyond,” Eric Trump told The Times Friday.
George W Bush’s White House ethics lawyer, Richard Painter, told the paper that “If the president receives any profits or benefits from foreign governments — not just new deals — then he is in violation of the Constitution.”
“The money flow has to stop on January 20,” he added.
The Trumps won a bidding war for the long-term lease on the Old Post Office building in 2012, which, during Trump’s presidency, became a place for lawmakers, supporters, lobbyists, and others with business in connection to the Trump administration to meet.
The New York Post previously reported that Trump is thinking about making a second bid for the hotel.
Rep. Gerry Connolly, the Democratic ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement Friday that “a second Trump presidency will bring with it another round of blatant self-dealing. The Trump Hotel in Washington is a billboard for conflicts of interest. Trump’s D.C. hotel received an estimated $3.7 million from foreign governments during his time in office, and he now returns to dip his fingers back in the pot. This kind of in-your-face self-enrichment cannot be tolerated again.”
The Trump family hired the real estate firm JLL in 2019 to find out if there was a buyer for the hotel. Eric Trump said at the time that the possibility of selling the rights to the hotel was prompted partly by the criticism that they were violating ethics rules as they made money from the property.
“People are objecting to us making so much money on the hotel, and therefore we may be willing to sell,” he told The Wall Street Journal.
The CGI Merchant Group subsequently bought the lease for $375 million but defaulted on the debt in connection with the deal in 2023. The lender, BDT & MSD Partners, foreclosed on the building and asserted control over the lease. The bank has been operating the hotel ever since.
