Ivanka Trump calls AG probe example of ‘vindictiveness’ and a ‘waste of taxpayer dollars’

The lawsuit argues the Trump inauguration committee wasted $1 million renting event space—from a Trump hotel

Ivanka Trump called the corruption investigation into her father’s inauguration a ‘politically motivated’ ‘waste of taxpayer dollars’ after she was herself deposed. 

Ms Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser, was deposed on Tuesday as part of Washington DC attorney general Karl A. Racine’s investigation which accuses the president’s 2017 inauguration committee of vastly overpaying for space at a Trump hotel in DC

She tweeted her frustrations on Thursday, as well as a screen shot of a 2016 email she says she sent to a senior employee at the hotel asking he charge the committee a “fair market rate.”

‘This week I spent 5+ hours in a deposition with the Democrat D.C. AG’s office…This inquiry is another politically motivated demonstration of vindictiveness & waste of taxpayers dollars’, she wrote. 

The suit, filed in January, accuses the inauguration committee of wasting more than $1 million renting out space at the Trump International Hotel. 

It says inauguration committees are supposed to foster civic engagement surrounding the event, but that Mr Trump’s inauguration committee “abandoned this purpose and violated District law when it wasted approximately $1 million of charitable funds in overpayment for the use of event space at the Trump Hotel.”

The DC investigation is a civil case, separate from a from a federal effort from Manhattan prosecutors looking into donors to the inauguration, who raised and spent a whopping $107 million, twice as much as their predecessors.  

Mr Trump’s marquee Washington hotel has been the locus of a number of controversies. Multiple petitions are pending before the Supreme Court arguing the president is violating constitutional provisions around receiving gifts in office by maintaining his ownership interest in the hotel, where foreign governments and lobbyists have spent lavishly to reserve rooms.

The president has reportedly discussed “pre-emptive” pardons for his children, including Ms Trump, in the hopes it will protect them against the raft of federal investigations that could be heading the Trump Organization’s way once he leaves office.