The State Department has been unable to account for all of the diplomatic gifts given to U.S. officials during the final year of the Trump administration, according to the State Department.
The Trump White House did not turn over information about the gifts former President Donald Trump, his family, former Vice President Mike Pence, and other White House staffers received in 2020, the department will claim in a report set to be published by the Federal Register next week.
“Potentially relevant records are not available to the State Department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol under applicable access rules for retired records of the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President,” the department said in a preview of the report posted Friday. “As a result, the data required to fully compile a complete listing for 2020 is unavailable.”
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Officials at the department sought the records but soon found they were “not available.” It is unclear why the records were not turned over or whether they were even kept.
The State Department’s Office of Protocol publishes a list of gifts top U.S. officials receive annually to promote transparency and fend off possible conflicts of interest. The list for 2020 will be published Monday. The office noted the situation in a footnote to a partial list of the gifts officials received in 2020.
Trump has faced mounting scrutiny over his record-keeping habits during his White House days. The House Oversight Committee opened a March inquiry into Trump’s records preservation after the National Archives and Records Administration collected 15 boxes of Trump administration records from his Mar-a-Lago resort. The documents were supposed to have been turned over to the agency after his departure from the White House last year in accordance with the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
Potentially classified materials, including documents marked “Top Secret” were among the boxes collected, archivists who reviewed the boxes concluded. They referred the matter to the Justice Department, which is reviewing the incident.
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During his time as president, Trump reportedly had a tendency to rip up documents, with staffers following him around to tape torn pages together in order to comply with the Presidential Records Act. Officials at the National Archives have scrambled to piece together some of the documents that had not been taped in a procedure one source described to the Washington Post as “unprecedented.”
In February, a report surfaced that an engineer would have to unclog White House toilets clogged with wads of paper, insinuating Trump flushed documents down the toilet. He has vehemently denied that report.
