Washington, D.C. (Apr. 12, 2019)—Today, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Government Operations, sent a letter to the General Services Administration (GSA) requesting documents that have been withheld for years relating to the Trump Organization’s lease with the federal government for the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C.

“Over the past two years, we have written to GSA with more than a dozen other Committee Members, requesting documents related to the lease and its management,” Cummings and Connolly wrote. “Under the Obama Administration, GSA produced many of these documents, but GSA abruptly changed course after Donald Trump was elected President and the agency began withholding these documents from Congress. ... Now that we are the Chairmen of the Committee on Oversight and Reform and the Subcommittee on Government Operations, we request that you produce the following documents by April 26, 2019.”

In January, the Office of the Inspector General at GSA issued a report raising grave questions about the management of this lease.

The report concluded that GSA “recognized that the President’s business interest in the OPO lease raised issues under the Constitution’s Emoluments Clauses that might cause a breach of the lease,” but GSA “attorneys decided to ignore the emoluments issues” in their assessment of the lease.

The report found “serious shortcomings” in GSA’s decision-making processes relating to the possible breach of the lease and recognized that “the constitutional issues surrounding the President’s business interests in the lease remain unresolved.”