A man walks past boxes being removed from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just outside the West Wing, inside the White House complex, Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021, in Washington.
Gerard Herbert | access point
The State Department says it cannot compile a complete and accurate accounting of gifts given to former President Donald Trump and other US officials by foreign governments during Trump’s last year in office, citing missing White House data.
In a report to be published in the Federal Register next week, the department says the Executive Office of the President failed to submit information on gifts received by Trump and his family from foreign leaders in 2020. It also says the Social Services Administration The Generals did not send information about gifts given to former Vice President Mike Pence and White House staff that year.
The State Department said it searched the National Archives and Records Administration and the General Services Administration for the missing information, but was told “potentially relevant records” are not available due to access restrictions related to the records. retired.
The State Department’s Office of Protocol reported the status in footnotes to a partial list of gifts received by US officials in 2020. The office publishes such lists annually in part to guard against potential conflicts of interest. A preview of the 2020 report was posted on the Federal Register website on Friday ahead of its formal release on Monday.
The report notes that the lack of information on gifts could be related to internal oversights, since the protocol office did not “submit the data request to all reporting agencies before January 20, 2021”, when the Trump administration ended. and the Biden administration began. However, he also noted that there was a “lack of proper records related to diplomatic gifts” between January 20, 2017, when Trump took office, and his departure from the White House four years later.
The State Department report comes as House lawmakers have opened an investigation into reports that Trump had taken boxes of classified material with him to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida after leaving office last year. The National Archives and Records Administration has asked the Justice Department to investigate the matter.
Meanwhile, the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill has identified a Gap of almost 8 hours in the official records of the White House of Trump’s phone calls as the violence unfolded and his supporters stormed the building, according to two people familiar with the investigation.
Regarding the 2020 gifts, the department said it had “attempted to collect the required data from current authoritative sources… but has confirmed that potentially relevant records are not available to the State Department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol under applicable access. rules for retired records of the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President.”
“As a result, the data needed to compile a full list for 2020 is not available,” he said.
Gift registries for Trump administration officials, such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and former head of the Central Intelligence Agency Gina Haspel, are included in the limited 2020 report, as are records of other high-level diplomats, Pentagon officials and the CIA.
Reference-www.cnbc.com