The State Department said in a report that it has an incomplete accounting of gifts presented to former President Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and other former Trump administration officials during Trump’s final year in office.
The department’s claim is issued in a full report set to be published in the Federal Register on Monday. A preview of the 2020 report was made available to the public on Friday ahead of its formal publication on Monday.
Citing missing data from the White House in the report, the department said the Executive Office of the President did not submit information about gifts received by Trump and his family from foreign leaders in 2020. Additionally, the department noted that the General Services Administration did not submit information related to gifts Pence and White House staffers received from foreign leaders in 2020.
The department wrote that it attempted to collect the missing information from the National Archives and Records Administration and the General Services Administration, but it was confirmed that “potentially relevant records are not available” to the protocol office “under applicable access rules for retired records.”
The finding by the State Department’s Office of Protocol is included in a footnote in the report of a partial list of gifts received by U.S. officials in 2020. The footnote notes that the “Office of the Chief of Protocol did not submit the request for data to all reporting agencies prior to January 20, 2021,” when Trump’s term ended and President Biden entered office.
However, another footnote in the report acknowledges a “lack of accurate recordkeeping pertaining to diplomatic gifts maintained by the Office of the Chief of Protocol’s Gift Unit” between January 20, 2017 — when Trump began his presidency — and through the end of his term in January 2021.
The report comes as the Justice Department is reportedly preparing to investigate Trump’s 15 boxes of White House documents that he brought to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
The report also comes on the heels of the revelation of a seven-hour call gap in Trump’s White House call logs and presidential diary on the day of the deadly Capitol insurrection. The National Archives turned over the call logs to the Jan. 6 Select Committee. The mammoth gap in Trump’s calls on Jan. 6 runs contrary to reports of multiple calls the then-President took with key allies as the insurrection unfolded last year.
