Trump’s Ballroom Contract Ensures Anonymity to Donors and Prevents Congress From Getting Answers for Conflict of Interest Queries

The worst part about Donald Trump’s plan to build a ginormous gilded ballroom is not the ballroom itself, as gaudy and bloated as it is. It’s the fact that it is being built with nearly half a billion dollars that Trump squeezed out of private donors—and the fact that, by the very design of the project, we don’t even get to know who paid these bribes.

However, The Washington Post at least got a hold of the contract that governs the donation scheme:

The Trump administration’s contract governing hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations to build President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom shields donors’ identities, excludes the White House from conflict of interest protections and was disclosed only after a lawsuit and a judge’s order, records obtained by The Washington Post show. …

The contract provisions, taken together, allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public. …

Charles Tiefer, a retired law professor at the University of Baltimore who spent three years on a congressionally authorized commission scrutinizing wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the anonymity provisions potentially set up the Trump administration to block congressional inquiries into the project’s funding.

“If Congress knocks on the door, the White House is going to slam it shut and say, ‘You’re not allowed to know these donors,’” Tiefer said.

In some respects, the Trump administration’s corruption is all being done out in the open. We know that rich people and big corporations are giving millions to feed his vanity. But the details are all kept completely in the dark. We know that favors are being traded, but what those favors are and who gets them is not for us plebeians to know.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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