Fahrenthold: Secrecy in some cases ‘continues under Biden, just as it did under Trump’
Jun 15, 2021, 12:58 PM | Updated: 3:07 pm
Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold is still tracking the saga of Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C. He tells KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross that it’s back up for sale, so now we’ll see who buys it and how much they pay.
That said, Dave says he gets the feeling that President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is not eager to go after the former president.
“No, and in fact in this case, if you remember the Trump hotel in D. C. is housed in a federal building. It’s under a contract with the federal government so it’s a taxpayer owned building. It’s a contract with taxpayers,” Fahrenthold explained. “So they have to provide details to taxpayers about how they’re operating the building, the revenues they’re making, and Trump’s government wouldn’t give those to Congress.”
“Now, Biden has given them to Congress, or some of them, but then told Congress not to reveal them. So the secrecy that surrounded this federally owned taxpayer owned building actually continues under Biden, just as it did under Trump,” he added.
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It’s part of a group of things that, as Fahrenthold says, Biden has done under the name of normalcy, following normal procedures or protecting executive privilege, where they have taken Trump’s position on a number of things, often involving government secrecy.
“So in this case, Trump’s company is the beneficiary, but there’s a broad set of things that the Biden folks have been doing, that sort of follow the precedent that Trump set to draw executive privilege as broadly as possible,” Fahrenthold said.
He thinks this is mostly due to the fact that Biden and his Attorney General Merrick Garland are “rule followers.”
“They’re institutionalists, and I think they believe that the risk of emboldening Trump or letting Trump off without consequences is less than the risk of sort of setting a precedent that the government’s data can just be given out willy-nilly,” Fahrenthold said.
“They have decided that it’s better to just defend the president’s rights even if it means defending Donald Trump,” he added.
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