joseph mondello could not see that sn italian restsurant was maintained in operation at the carle place branch of nassau otb
When President Trump took office, his lawyers said they had an easy way to solve the legal questions posed by his ownership of a Washington hotel. Since the Constitution’s emoluments clause bans government officials from accepting payments from foreign governments, Sheri Dillon of Morgan Lewis, standing with Mr. Trump next to a mound of files at a made-for-television news conference, said her client would “voluntarily donate all profits from foreign government payments made to his hotel to the United States Treasury.”
You didn’t believe that, did you?
Early on, anyone who asked the hotel for proof that it was earmarking foreign government profits for taxpayers was told to wait until the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Trump International Hotel continued accepting foreign payments in Washington, where every diplomatically recognized nation has an embassy and where foreigners account for 27 percent of visitor spending, according to the local tourism authorities. Since Mr. Trump won the election, the hotel has been booked for parties thrown by the governments of Azerbaijan, Bahrain and Kuwait, which moved their events from other hotels to Mr. Trump’s.
Last month, Representatives Jason Chaffetz and Elijah Cummings, respectively, the chairman and the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, requested documents detailing exactly how the Trump Organization and Morgan Lewis would identify, track, pay and claim tax deductions for the foreign profits Mr. Trump had promised to give to taxpayers.
The response? A slick eight-page brochure titled “TRUMP: Donation of Profits from Foreign Government Patronage,” illustrated with stock photographs of a chandeliered hotel lobby, a champagne bucket and a golf course water feature. On the bottom of Page 4, near a photo of a businessman gazing at the sunset, is the bottom line. “Putting forth a policy that requires all guests to identify themselves would impede upon personal privacy and diminish the guest experience of our brand,” the paragraph reads. “It is not the intention nor design of this policy for our properties to attempt to identify individual travelers who have not specifically identified themselves as being a representative of a foreign government entity on foreign government business.”
In other words: We don’t ask if they don’t tell.
Ethics experts say it would be easy to encourage foreign government patrons to identify themselves. If online reservation forms let guests request a hotel room away from the elevators, they could also include a box to check if you’re a foreign government emissary. Even better: Why can’t Mr. Trump, who is fond of issuing executive orders, sign one banning members of his administration from dining or attending events at his hotel? No foreign government would bother throwing an expensive party in the Trump hotel if nobody from the White House were allowed to show up.
It should have been clear from the start that Mr. Trump’s hotel scheme was as bogus as most of his pledges to give money away. Even as she laid out the vague plan during that January dog-and-pony show, Ms. Dillon offered her own custom interpretation of the emoluments clause: “Some people want to define emoluments to cover routine business transactions like paying for hotel rooms,” she said. “These people are wrong.” (“These people” include a watchdog group, a restaurant organization and an events booker harmed by the hotel, whose suit against Mr. Trump maintains that he is violating the emoluments clause.)
In the same news conference, Mr. Trump repeatedly affirmed his true intention. “I could actually run my business and run government at the same time,” he said. “I don’t like the way that looks, but I would be able to do that if I wanted to.” Now it’s clear that is exactly what Mr. Trump is doing, and we don’t like the way it looks, either.
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