According to the Post, the full guest list for Trump’s most selective inaugural events “caught the attention of counterintelligence officials at the FBI, according to former U.S. officials … because some of the figures had surfaced in the agency’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.”301 ABC News will subsequently report that federal law enforcement is also investigating “inaugural donations tied to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.”302 In 2019, NBC News will report that fourteen “major contributors” to Trump’s inaugural fund—donating more than $350,000 on average—received nominations to be U.S. ambassadors.303
On the payout side of the inaugural ledger, Vanity Fair will reveal that $1.5 million was paid to Trump’s International Hotel in D.C. to house Gates and more than a dozen inaugural staffers, and that the hotel provided the inaugural committee with a surprisingly high cost estimate for pre-inaugural events.304 More troublingly, the magazine reports that—despite claims that Trump and Gates had had a falling-out and that Trump wanted Barrack to fire Gates—Gates’s position in fact gave him a “high access level … security pass within Trump Tower” and that his “closeness with the Trump family” was readily apparent.305 Gates was, in particular, in “constant communication” with Trump’s adult children, “frequently work[ing] out of Donald Trump Jr.’s office [in Trump Tower]” despite the offices for the inaugural committee being across the street from the Trump-owned building.306 Per Vanity Fair, as the presidential transition period wore on, Wolkoff increasingly was “left out of meetings” she was supposed to be invited to regarding the inaugural committee’s finances, and found that time and time again she “could not justify the [budget] numbers coming in,” as it seemed the inaugural committee was repeatedly being suspiciously overcharged by certain vendors.307
According to Vanity Fair, Wolkoff’s gravest concern regarding inauguration spending focuses on Barrack’s Chairman’s Dinner, which received an inordinate amount of money and attention, according to the chief inaugural planner.308 Perhaps most telling is the revelation of a draft guest list for the event, which includes a number of named individuals—among them Michael Flynn, Elliott Broidy, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, Steve Mnuchin, K. T. McFarland, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, Wilbur Ross, Rex Tillerson, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, Franklin Haney (see chapter 9), and the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba—but also seven unnamed Saudi “foreign ministers,” one unnamed foreign minister from Qatar, and one unnamed foreign minister from the United Arab Emirates.309 Vanity Fair notes that the Saudis, the Qatari, and the Emirati were the only dinner guests whose names were not revealed.310
Now that the inaugural committee is the subject of, as described by ProPublica, a “wide-ranging federal criminal investigation,” assessments of the players involved—and the laws potentially broken—are becoming public. ProPublica observes that inaugural money being paid to Trump’s D.C. hotel, and Ivanka Trump being involved in the negotiations for those payments, could violate federal tax laws; it notes, too, that the Trumps’ inaugural planners were so set on using Trump’s hotel for inaugural events that they pushed the hotel’s management to cancel a prayer breakfast to make space for an event Trump then billed to the inaugural fund.311 In February 2019, the Southern District of New York will announce that it is investigating possible mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, false statements, election fraud, and conspiracy to defraud the United States in conjunction with Trump’s inauguration, issuing subpoenas seeking “all information related to inaugural donors, vendors, contractors, bank accounts of the inaugural committee and any information related to foreign contributors to the committee,” according to the Washington Post, which further notes that “only U.S. citizens and legal residents can legally donate to a committee established to finance presidential inaugural festivities.”312 According to the New York Times, the subpoenas are intended not just to determine if “any foreigners illegally donated to the committee” but also to discover “whether committee staff members knew that such donations were illegal, asking for documents laying out legal requirements for donations.”313
Two recipients of inauguration-related subpoenas are Los Angeles venture capitalist Imaad Zuberi and Avenue Ventures, a firm Zuberi is affiliated with; by January 13, 2019, Avenue Ventures had donated a total of $1 million to the inaugural committee and the host committee for the 2016 Republican National Convention.314 Over the same period, Zuberi himself gave nearly $500,000 to Trump’s reelection committee and to the Republican National Committee.315 At issue in the ongoing investigation of Zuberi is likely one of two possibilities: that Zuberi was used as a straw donor for illegal foreign