A year ago Thursday, President Donald Trump rolled out plans to separate himself while in government from his hotel, real estate, golf and branding enterprises. Trump International Hotel Las Vegas is pictured here. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images House Dems press for subpoenas on Trump Organization operations

House Democrats are pressing for their GOP counterparts to launch a “serious investigation” and approve subpoenas targeting President Donald Trump’s private company to reveal its operations since its founder and owner entered the White House.

The 17 Democratic members of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee said in a letter to the panel’s chairman that they were frustrated by Republicans for failing to dive deeper since Trump a year ago Thursday first rolled out plans to separate himself while in government from his hotel, real estate, golf and branding enterprises.


Namely, the lawmakers argued, the president faces “numerous conflicts of interest” and must be called to account for his compliance with a constitutional block on foreign government payments to presidents.

“Over the past year, President Trump and his attorneys have stalled virtually any credible oversight, and unfortunately our Committee has done nothing to push back on these efforts, press for answers to these questions, or obtain documents that would assist our efforts to carry out our duties under the Constitution to act as an independent check on the President and the Executive Branch,” the Democrats wrote.

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The lawmakers specifically called on Republicans to subpoena the Trump Organization by his one-year inauguration anniversary on Jan. 20 to get more details on a pledge to donate the company’s profits from foreign government officials to the Treasury Department.

Spokespersons for House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, as well as the White House and Trump Organization, did not respond to requests for comment about the Democrats’ letter. Bobby Burchfield, the Trump Organization’s outside ethics adviser, declined comment.

Trump last January during a pre-inauguration press conference at his namesake tower in Manhattan proposed making the foreign government donations as an alternative to what many Democrats and good-government experts said was the far more ethical approach: selling his company outright or putting it into a blind trust like other presidents who were elected to office with major business holdings.

Instead, Trump handed day-to-day management of the company to his two oldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and he vowed to deal with the constitutional questions by donating those specific profits to the Treasury.

So far, that plan has lacked much in the way of public details. The company said last spring in a nine-page pamphlet to company employees that it would be “impractical” to single out specific foreign guests when calculating the donations and instead outlined a formula based on hospitality industry standards that would account for everything from hotel and conference room rentals to sales of food and beverages, spa services and golf rounds.

The company also said it would wait to make its first annual donations in 2018.

Challenges to Trump’s business arrangement have also been working through the courts, though so far plaintiffs have had trouble finding solid legal footing. A federal judge in New York last month dismissed two emolument lawsuits: from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and a group of employees and owners of restaurants and hotels, as well as a class-action suit on behalf of the public. The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge George Daniels, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, said the two suits didn’t show injuries related to the use of the president’s properties and they also lacked standing to sue.

A similar suit by the state of Maryland and Washington, D.C., is set for a key hearing Jan. 25 in federal district court in Greenbelt, Maryland. Another case filed in federal district court by nearly 200 Democratic federal lawmakers still awaits a judge’s ruling on a motion by Trump’s attorneys to dismiss it.

