Donald Trump received preferential treatment from Deutsche Bank to ease a loan for his Trump International Hotel while in office, and also failed to disclose the source of $3.7m in billings the property generated from foreign governments, according to a report released by a congressional committee on Friday.
In a letter to the administrator of the General Services Administration on Friday, two top Democrats on the House committee on oversight and reform, Carolyn Maloney and Gerald Connolly, accused the former president of providing “misleading information” about the money-losing Washington DC hotel’s finances, as well as concealing hundreds of millions of dollars in his own debts.
The five-star hotel, which opened its doors in September 2016 — weeks after Trump accepted the Republican nomination for the presidency — has been the subject of persistent accusations of conflicts of interest during his term in office. Critics claim that large-scale bookings on behalf of Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments were intended to curry favour with the president — something the Trumps have denied.
Maloney, the oversight committee’s chair, and Connolly, who leads the subcommittee on government operations, said they had obtained documents that shed new light on the former president’s dealings with Deutsche Bank, which became one of his largest lenders after other banks shunned him following a number of bankruptcies.
The Trump Organization blasted the report as “intentionally misleading, irresponsible and unequivocally false”.
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