Trump’s Businesses Show Mixed Returns During Campaign and Presidency

By STEVE EDER, ERIC LIPTON and ANDREW W. LEHREN

The Trump International Hotel in Washington and the Mar-a-Lago private resort in Florida have been among President Trump’s favorite spots to visit in the months since he became president. And both were among the most lucrative properties in his portfolio during what otherwise was a mixed year for the Trump family businesses, according to a financial disclosure report released Friday.

The 98-page report is the first official look at how Mr. Trump’s private finances fared during his campaign and the early months of presidency, even as he has stepped away from the day-to-day management duties of his company. They show Mr. Trump and his related business entities reported revenue of at least $597 million, down about 3 percent from the $615 million in the period a year before. Mr. Trump reported assets valued at a minimum of $1.4 billion, down slightly from $1.5 billion in 2016.

One place where his revenue fell considerably was at Trump National Doral, a golf resort near Miami and his biggest cash flow generator. It reported revenue of $116 million, down 12 percent from Mr. Trump’s 2016 disclosure, even though the Trump Organization recently completed a major renovation there.

Revenues at his aircraft company, which the Trump campaign used to move him around the country during his presidential bid, more than doubled to $7.7 million.

 

Revenues also jumped at Mar-a-Lago, which Mr. Trump has called the “Winter White House,” reaching $37.3 million. That was an increase from $29.8 million in a roughly corresponding 16-month period that began in January 2015, and $15.6 million in a similar time period that began in early 2014. The Trump Organization doubled the initiation fee that new members must pay to join the club, shortly after Mr. Trump was elected president.

The document released Friday provides no new information about any possible ties to Russia, echoing the statement released last month by Mr. Trump’s lawyers. Mr. Trump’s business interests, which already have been the source of constitutional challenges and ethics complaints, are more complicated than those of any previous president. Even with the disclosure offered Friday, the picture of his finances is far from complete as they lack the level of detail normally provided in tax returns, which Mr. Trump has refused to make public.

As president, Mr. Trump has helped highlight his family’s properties by repeatedly visiting his golf courses and Mar-a-Lago. Since he was sworn in, he has visited family business properties on at least 42 different days, with 25 of those at Mar-a-Lago, according to a tally by The New York Times.

Mr. Trump filed the disclosure, which generally covers a period from January 2016 to April 2017, with the assistance of the Office of Government Ethics to follow a practice set by President Barack Obama. He was technically not required to make the filing until next year. It is not known how profitable the golf clubs and resorts are, because The Trump Organization is a private business and Mr. Trump only releases revenue figures in his public disclosures. “President Trump welcomed the opportunity to voluntarily file his personal financial disclosure form; while this filing is voluntary (as no report was due until May 2018), it has been certified by the Office of Government Ethics pursuant to its normal procedures,” White House representatives said in a statement.

One of the Trump Organization’s new endeavors, Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., set up in a once rundown federal building that the Trump family spent $200 million to renovate, had revenue of about $20 million, the disclosure said.

The hotel opened its doors in September and since Election Day it has become a magnet for foreigners and lobbyists, with executives explicitly pitching the hotel as smart place for foreign diplomats to hold events. The hotel has been the site of Bahrain’s National Day celebration, and a prominent conference on United States-Turkey relations. It also served as the host of the American Petroleum Institute board meeting in March — an event that drew two members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet — while also making the family company a considerable fee.

Revenue from his international operations — including residential buildings, golf courses and hotels in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East — did not change significantly in the last year even though several properties, for which he collects a licensing fee, opened recently including in Manila and Dubai. There were some exceptions, including a new tower in Vancouver, which produced at least $5 million in revenue, and an entity affiliated connected to Kolkata, India, which brought in $100,000 to $1 million.

Renewed sales of his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, also increased. The title brought in at least $100,000, double the minimum revenue listed last year.

Lawyers involved in suing Mr. Trump, based on allegations that he is violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution because his businesses are accepting payments from foreign governments, said that the financial disclosure, while helpful, left many of their questions unresolved. “It just elevates questions,” said Maryland state Attorney General Brian E. Frosh, who this week sued Mr. Trump, along with the attorney general from Washington, D.C., in what is one of at least three such lawsuits. “Just how much money is he getting from foreign sources, who is he getting it from and what impact does it have on his foreign policy and his actions as president?”

Mr. Trump has vowed to donate profits that his hotel makes from foreign governments and officials. But his company has found that to be more difficult in practice, because it is hard to identify foreign government officials who conduct business there.

In total, he listed at least $310 million in liabilities, about the same amount as last year, although that is debt held only by companies that his family has majority control over. His creditors include a range of financial companies and banks, from big names like Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch, to lesser-known ones like Amboy Bank in New Jersey.

Mr. Trump has said his net worth is more than $10 billion, but other analyses have concluded that he is worth less. In March, Forbes estimated Mr. Trump’s net worth at $3.5 billion, $200 million less than a year earlier. It attributed the decrease to money he spent on the campaign, the real estate conditions around Trump Tower and other factors, such as the sale of his liquid assets, like stocks.

Trump administration plans to minimize civil rights efforts in agencies

By Juliet Eilperin, Emma Brown and Darryl Fears


The Trump administration is planning to disband the Labor Department division that has policed discrimination among federal contractors for four decades, according to the White House’s newly proposed budget, part of wider efforts to rein in government programs that promote civil rights.

As outlined in Labor’s fiscal 2018 plan, the move would fold the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, now home to 600 employees, into another government agency in the name of cost-cutting.

The proposal to dismantle the compliance office comes at a time when the Trump administration is reducing the role of the federal government in fighting discrimination and protecting minorities by cutting budgets, dissolving programs and appointing officials unsympathetic to previous practices.

The new leadership at the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has proposed eliminating its environmental justice program, which addresses pollution that poses health threats specifically concentrated in minority communities. The program, in part, offers money and technical help to residents who are confronted with local hazards such as leaking oil tanks or emissions from chemical plants.

Under President Trump’s proposed budget, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights — which has investigated thousands of complaints of discrimination in school districts across the country and set new standards for how colleges should respond to allegations of sexual assault and harassment — would also see significant staffing cuts. Administration officials acknowledge in budget documents that the civil rights office will have to scale back the number of investigations it conducts and limit travel to school districts to carry out its work.

  How Trump is rolling back Obama’s legacy View Graphic  

[Obama, Biden rewrite the rulebook on handling sexual assault on campus]
 
And the administration has reversed several steps taken under President Barack Obama to address LGBT concerns. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, has revoked a rule ensuring that transgender people can stay at sex-segregated shelters of their choice, and the Department of Health and Human Services has removed a question about sexual orientation from two surveys of elderly Americans about services offered or funded by the government.

The efforts to reduce the federal profile on civil rights reflects the consensus view within the Trump administration that Obama officials exceeded their authority in policing discrimination on the state and local level, sometimes pressuring targets of government scrutiny to adopt policies that were not warranted.

Administration officials made clear in the initial weeks of Trump’s presidency that they would break with the civil rights policies of his predecessor. Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered a review of agreements to reform police departments, signaling his skepticism of efforts to curb civil rights abuses by law enforcement officers. His Justice Department, meantime, stopped challenging a controversial Texas voter identification law and joined with the Education Department in withdrawing federal guidance allowing transgender students to use school bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity.

While these decisions have been roundly criticized by liberal activists, administration officials said that civil rights remain a priority for the Trump White House.

“The Trump administration has an unwavering commitment to the civil rights of all Americans,” White House spokeswoman Kelly Love said in an emailed statement.

But Vanita Gupta, who was the head of Justice’s civil rights division from October 2014 to January 2017, said that the administration’s actions have already begun to adversely affect Americans across the country.

“They can call it a course correction, but there’s little question that it’s a rollback of civil rights across the board,” said Gupta, who is now president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Labor’s budget proposal says that folding its compliance office into the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission “will reduce operational redundancies, promote efficiencies, improve services to citizens, and strengthen civil rights enforcement.”

Historically, the two entities have played very different roles. Unlike the EEOC, which investigates complaints it receives, the compliance office audits contractors in a more systematic fashion and verifies that they “take affirmative action” to promote equal opportunity among their employees.

Patricia A. Shiu, who led the compliance office from 2009 to 2016, said the audits are crucial because most workers don’t know they have grounds to file a complaint. “Most people do not know why they don’t get hired. Most people do not know why they do not get paid the same as somebody else,” she said.

Under Obama, officials in the compliance office often conducted full-scale audits of companies, examining their practices in multiple locations, rather than carrying out shorter, more limited reviews as previous administrations had done.

Some companies have questioned the more aggressive approach, noting the office has consistently found since 2004 that 98 percent of federal contractors comply with the law.

But the compliance office also scored some major recent legal victories, including a $1.7 million settlement with Palantir Technologies over allegations that the data-mining company’s hiring practices discriminated against Asians. In a case involving Gordon Food Service, which serves the Agriculture Department, the Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the office found the company had “systematically eliminated qualified women from the hiring process.” The firm agreed to pay $1.85 million in wages to 926 women who had applied for jobs and hire 37 of them. Gordon Food was also forced to no longer require women to take a strength test.

[See which Post reporters are responsible for covering federal agencies]

 

In Education Department budget documents, the administration acknowledges that proposed funding levels would hamper the work of that department’s civil rights office. The budget would reduce staffing by more than 40 employees.

“To address steady increases in the number of complaints received and decreased staffing levels, OCR must make difficult choices,” the budget documents say. “OCR’s enforcement staff will be limited in conducting onsite investigations and monitoring, and OCR’s ability to achieve greater coordination and communication regarding core activities will be greatly diminished.”

Some critics of the civil rights office said school districts often felt they were presumed guilty in the eyes of the federal government.

“There was sort of this sense that . . . if there was a complaint filed, there must have been done something wrong,” said Thomas J. Gentzel, executive director of the National School Boards Association. “But there’s usually two sides to a story.”

Education Department spokeswoman Liz Hill said that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Candice E. Jackson, who has been named as the acting head of the civil rights office, are committed to protecting all students from discrimination.

“Each civil rights complaint received by OCR is given due care and attention, with OCR serving as a fair and impartial investigative office,” Hill said.

Jackson’s nomination has added to the anxiety of civil rights activists. Jackson, a lawyer from Vancouver, Wash. and author of a book about women who had accused President Bill Clinton of sexual assault, has written that programs aimed at fostering a diverse student body dismiss “the very real prices paid by individual people who end up injured by affirmative action.”

Similar concerns have been raised about Trump’s likely selection of Eric S. Dreiband to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division. A former Bush administration official and veteran conservative Washington lawyer, Dreiband has represented several companies that were sued for discrimination. (Dreiband is representing the Washington Post in an age and race discrimination case in federal court in the District.)

Trump’s “America First“ Infrastructure Plan: Let Saudi Arabia and Blackstone Take Care of It

By David Dayen

Throughout the presidential campaign, Donald Trump blasted his rival for taking money from Saudi Arabia, which, he regularly charged, has a horrific human rights record and was behind the attack on September 11.

“You talk about women and women’s rights? So these are people that push gays off buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly. And yet you take their money,” he complained.

Trump, of course, has never been married to anything he has said in the past. But even by Trumpian standards, a recent series of deals he struck with Saudi Arabia stand out.

The two that made the news — a $110 billion arms deal and a $100 million gift to an Ivanka Trump-inspired endowment — are remarkable in their own right.

But the third, which was rolled out much more quietly, is no less stunning: The Saudi kingdom joined forces with a top outside adviser to Trump to build a $40 billion war chest to privatize U.S. infrastructure.

The vehicle would employ the same kind of public-private partnerships, known as P3s, the Trump administration has endorsed for its trillion dollar infrastructure plan. The deal hands over control of projects to rebuild American roads and bridges to the private sector and a foreign country.

The Saudi Public Investment Fund announced its $20 billion investment with Blackstone, the private equity giant whose CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, chairs the Strategic and Policy Forum, a key group of private-sector advisers to President Trump. In recent months Schwarzman has become a key adviser to the president, speaking to him “several times a week,” according to Politico. Schwarzman, who has an estate near Mar-a-Lago and has known Trump for years, is a Republican megadonor, giving over $4 million to Super PACs that support conservative candidates in the last election cycle.

The Saudi investment was announced when Trump was in Saudi Arabia and was touted by the White House as part of Trump’s commitment to render deals for outside investment in America. Blackstone described the deal as “the culmination of a year’s discussions” and insisted the White House was not involved. 

But the managing director of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Yasir Al Rumayyan, explicitly said that the deal “reflects our positive views around the ambitious infrastructure initiatives being undertaken in the United States as announced by President Trump.”

The timing was also notable, coming just after Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner negotiated a $110 billion arms sale to the Saudis. Kushner and Blackstone have a long history; Blackstone is one of the largest lenders to Kushner’s business, with over $400 million in financing since 2013.

Schwarzman, of course, is not a disinterested adviser to the president. He and his firm stands to gain massively from public policy decisions, whether Trump’s reversal on Chinese currency manipulation (Blackstone is heavily invested in China and even warned investors that labeling China a currency manipulator would harm the company financially) or the administration’s reticence on closing the carried interest loophole (which not only benefits Blackstone but Schwarzman himself). The loophole generates billions of dollars for Blackstone.

“Donald Trump brokering a deal between Saudi royalty and private equity magnates associated with both the Republican and Democratic Party is about as much corruption and self-dealing as can be squeezed into a single sentence,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project. “This deal essentially constitutes the singularity of corruption and represents all that is broken with our global politics.”

This conflict carries over to infrastructure, a business Blackstone has been focused on since last year. They’re looking to capitalize on Trump’s victory, and his long-promised plan to use private money to leverage around $200 billion in public funds over ten years for building projects. The infrastructure plan surprisingly got slipped into Trump’s budget proposal. 

“There is broad agreement that the United States urgently needs to invest in its rapidly aging infrastructure,” said Blackstone president Tony James this week. James is a donor to Democratic presidential candidates.

Most Democrats have dismissed Trump’s infrastructure plan as “sleight-of-hand,” because his budget actually cuts transportation spending, more than offsetting the $200 billion investment. The cuts include zeroing out a popular state grant program called TIGER, along with slashes to Amtrak and other transit projects. 

In addition to P3s, Trump’s advisers talk of using a model popular in Australia, where proceeds from sales of public assets get funneled into new projects. So under the Trump plan, direct federal investments in infrastructure would be lowered, while private control of projects would ramp up. This benefits Blackstone and Saudi Arabia.

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, in a puzzling statement, characterized the Trump budget as not a cut in infrastructure spending, but a “dropoff.”

State and local governments don’t lack private capital for infrastructure; municipal bonds are a $3.7 trillion market. Advocates are concerned that companies like Blackstone want an equity stake in infrastructure that will prove more costly than muni bond funding. P3s could generate high tolls and user fees, as the private sector expects a greater return on investment. 

In addition, critics charge that P3s narrow where infrastructure projects happen; replacing water systems for the poor in Flint won’t make back the kind of money that a bridge or toll road connecting an affluent suburb might. P3s more generally have been criticized for limiting democratic control of public assets. 

“Why would we take some of the resources we have and hand them away to Wall Street?” asked Donald Cohen of the anti-privatization group In the Public Interest. “And give them control over the asset for 20, 30, 40, 50 years?”

Saudi Arabia put up half of Blackstone total investment in their infrastructure fund. A single investor putting that big a commitment into one private equity fund is atypical, and would essentially have a foreign government profit from fees like toll roads.

When the United Arab Emirates attempted to use the state-owned company Dubai Ports World to buy six U.S. seaports in 2006, it generated significant controversy, stoked by right-wing media figures like Lou Dobbs and Democrats such as Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, was saw an opportunity to damage then-President Bush. The deal eventually fell apart, as Dubai Ports World sold off its stake. By contrast, the Blackstone-Saudi deal has not registered much comment.

But Saudi Arabia’s money will get funneled through a close Trump adviser in a grab for state and local infrastructure, with the expectation of billions of dollars in profits off the roads, bridges, and transit systems the public uses every day. Blackstone expects to use the $40 billion in the infrastructure fund to leverage the purchase of $100 billion in projects, fully 10 percent of Trump’s total commitment. 

James told The New York Times that Blackstone could “establish overnight a leadership position” in infrastructure with the Saudi investment. Blackstone’s stock has surged since the Trump election and went up over 7 percent when the Saudi deal was announced.

Schwarzman, whose most recent birthday party featured trapeze artists, live camels, and Gwen Stefani, was in Riyadh last week for a whirlwind of dealmaking known as the U.S.-Saudi CEO Forum. 

The private equity titan is hardly the only financier personally benefiting from an advisory position with the Trump administration. For example, legendary trader Carl Icahn, another adviser, has been using his influence to get the administration to change ethanol rules that would save companies he owns hundreds of millions of dollars. Icahn has also been personally speculating on financial instruments related to his push for changes in ethanol rules.