A House committee said Trump and his family have stopped reporting nearly $300,000 in gifts from foreign governments.

(CNN) – Donald Trump and his family have ceased to report nearly $300,000 in gifts they received from foreign governments between 2017 and 2020, including a “larger-than-life-sized painting” of the former president that may currently be located at his residence in Mar-a-Lago. According to a new report by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee and supporting documents obtained by CNN.

More than 100 gifts from foreign officials, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with a total value of more than $250,000, were not reported to the State Department by Trump and his family members. He says.

House Democrats say the discovery of these undisclosed foreign gifts — including 17 from Saudi Arabia totaling more than $48,000 — “raises important questions about why former President Trump failed to disclose these gifts to the public” and whether it is possible use it. To influence US policy under the previous administration. The report provides no specific evidence that US policy has been affected by free.

Jamie Raskin, R-Maryland and the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told CNN that the fact that these items were never reported and that some are now missing “indicates serious violations of the foreign emoluments clause.”

“This part of the Constitution is the original anti-bribery law of the United States,” Raskin said, noting that lawmakers can file criminal cases if there is evidence to warrant it.

“But really, on a bipartisan basis, Congress needs to pass legislation to build meaningful enforcement mechanisms into the emoluments clause,” he added. “This will force us to recover the wisdom of the architects who maintained that people in public office are not exposed to foreign governments.”

House Democrats have sought to point the finger at Trump’s foreign commitments, as fellow Republicans and the oversight committee’s new Republican chair, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, ramp up their own investigations into Trump’s foreign dealings. President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

Last year, the State Department disclosed that it could not provide a full account of the foreign gifts Trump officials received during the president’s last year in office, but the interim report released Friday cites “new information obtained by the Commission (which) reveals that the non-persons were The disclosure of foreign government gifts is much broader than previously known and has spilled over throughout the Trump administration.”

Internal White House records obtained by the Commission indicate that the lists provided by the White House to the Office of the Chief of Protocol did not include all foreign gifts received by former President Trump and the First Family, not only in 2020, but throughout the Trump administration,” it states. the report.

“In total, records indicate that former President Trump and the First Family received 117 unreported foreign gifts, valued at approximately $291,000,” says the interim report. The report focuses on undisclosed gifts from Saudi Arabia, Japan, India and China.

“From a legal point of view, of course, it makes no difference whether they were completely reckless or deliberately decided to flout the law and the Constitution; but from a moral point of view, we can safely say that this is exactly the kind of little detail that Donald Trump likes to obsess over.”

On an individual level, Trump has reported no more than 50 foreign gifts, with an estimated total value of more than $150,000, during his time in office, according to the House Democrats. As for the foreign gifts he shared with the State Department, Trump disclosed 36 in 2017, 17 in 2018, 23 in 2019 and zero in 2020.

The Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act prohibits the president and federal officials from receiving foreign gifts in excess of the minimum value, which is currently set at $415. The law also created a system for how information about foreign gifts should be publicly disclosed and allow recipients of items valued above the said dollar amount the option to buy and keep them.

The report added that some of the gifts Trump received were worth tens of thousands of dollars, including an Uzbek silk rug worth $12,000 and a dagger worth $35,000 from the Emir of Qatar.

The whereabouts of some items are unknown, including a “larger-than-life-size painting” of Trump that was ordered by El Salvador’s leader and given as a gift just before the 2020 election.

The commission obtained internal communications from the White House, including correspondence about the shipment of the painting from the US Embassy in El Salvador to the United States, but found that “there are no records regarding the disposition of the painting.”

NARA did not have any records for this board and the GSA [Administración de Servicios Generales] He also had no records of purchasing this gift,” the report says.

However, despite GSA transfer documents indicating that the Director of Correspondence for Donald J. Trump’s office certified “full compliance with the final disposition of the donations” in April 2021, some records indicate that the image may have been transferred to Florida as “property.” the former president “in July 2021,” he adds.

Email exchanges involving photos of the US ambassador to El Salvador standing next to a larger-than-life portrait of Trump suggest that staff were arranging for the State Department to help move the gift from the ambassador’s residence to the White House.

Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, sent the ambassador’s initial email about the painting to the White House staff, writing, “Can we take care of this? Very good,” to which a former Trump White House staffer responded: “Yeah, it was sent to me and I’m replaying it.” Point it to WH!”

The report lists another item that committee investigators have not been able to track down despite reviewing White House, NARA and GSA data, a gift Kushner received from Egypt.

The White House Gift Office under the Trump administration asked the National Archives to transfer a number of gifts from its custody to the White House, which included this gift to Kushner. But there are no records of the whereabouts of this gift, a silver embossed box with an estimated value of $450.

There is also no evidence to suggest that the fund is currently in Kushner’s possession.

The panel also found that Kushner, his wife Ivanka Trump, and their children together received 33 undisclosed gifts, totaling nearly $82,000.

According to the report, the committee identified 13 additional unreported foreign gifts addressed to both former President Trump and former first lady Melania Trump, totaling more than $22,000.