General Services Administration briefly posts damaging information about Donald Trump’s finances
The General Services Administration is calling it an accident, but for all we know, a rogue employee may have done it on purpose: the agency briefly posted information about Donald Trump’s finances on its website which seems perfectly timed to harm him, even as a lawsuit just advanced in court aimed at nailing him for his violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.
The data posted by the GSA reveals that the newly opened Trump International Hotel in Washington DC is raking in millions of dollars in unexpected profits in the months since Donald Trump took office (source: link). This is a direct result of Trump using his office to steer international business to his hotel in some instances, while in other instances diplomats and lobbyists have booked his hotel to try to curry political favor with him. This is precisely why the Founding Fathers wrote the Emoluments Clause, and why leading legal scholars are now suing Trump over it. And the timing of the leak could not be better for the plaintiffs.
This GSA leak comes just two days after a judge set a trial date for the Emoluments lawsuit against Donald Trump (source: link), effectively handing valuable evidence about Trump’s DC hotel finances to the plaintiffs at the ideal time. So maybe this was just a fortuitous coincidence, or maybe someone in the GSA decided to play “oops” in order to help out those trying to expose Trump’s crimes against the Constitution.
Either way, now we have official confirmation from the federal government itself that the Trump hotel down the street from the White House has made millions of dollars in profits, when it had originally been expected to lose money in these same months if Trump had lost the election. It further raises the question of why a supposed “billionaire” has been willing to violate the Constitution in such desperate fashion over a mere few million dollars – and if this means he’s as broke as many have come to suspect.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report