Inside Trump's mysterious project –and the secret contract nobody was supposed to see

While the financing of President Donald Trump’s planned $400 million White House ballroom has been shrouded in mystery for months, government watchdog Public Citizen has obtained important new information about the project’s funding.

Public Citizen on Tuesday unveiled a copy of the funding agreement the Trump administration has used for the ballroom project after months of legal wrangling that forced the group to file a lawsuit to compel enforcement of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request it made last year.

As summarized by The Washington Post, the ballroom contract’s provisions “allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public.”

While dozens of big-name corporate donors—including Amazon, Apple, Lockheed Martin, Google, Altria, and Union Pacific Railroad—have been public about their donations to the project, the fact that some donors can choose to remain anonymous is raising serious concerns among ethics experts.

Charles Tiefer, a retired law professor at the University of Baltimore with a long history of scrutinizing government contracts, told the Post that the contract’s anonymity provisions could give the Trump administration an escape hatch from future congressional scrutiny.

“If Congress knocks on the door,” Tiefer said, “the White House is going to slam it shut and say, ‘You’re not allowed to know these donors.’”

This means that there is no way to know whether these donors have business before the government, and no way to know if they expect to get something in return for their donations.

Kathleen Clark, a government ethics lawyer and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Post that the contract’s very narrow scope of reviewing for conflicts of interest among donors renders it “nothing more than a sham.”

Jon Golinger, democracy advocate for Public Citizen, said the key takeaway from the newly unearthed documents is that “anonymous donations are the heart of this agreement.”

“The questions this raises are, of the hundreds of millions being funneled in secret, who are these anonymous donors, and what are they hiding?” Golinger added. “The American people deserve answers, and we’ll keep fighting until they get them.”

Wendy Liu, Public Citizen attorney and lead counsel on the lawsuit to obtain the contract, said the administration’s initial refusal to comply with a FOIA request was “flatly unlawful,” and “the American people are entitled to transparency over this multimillion-dollar project, and this win gets us a bit closer to knowing the truth.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) blasted the Trump administration’s efforts to hide the contract in a statement given to the Post.

“At every turn, President Trump has sought to conceal the facts about his monstrous multimillion-dollar ballroom,” Blumenthal said. “His administration has kept the contract under wraps, the identities of big dollar donors secret, and the American people in the dark about what big corporations have to gain by funding this boondoggle.”

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