By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
A longtime friend and business partner of Donald Trump and his family is one of three finalists to build a new FBI headquarters and campus, raising serious ethical questions.
“It creates a huge conflict,” Rep. Gerald Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who sits on the House Oversight Committee, told ABC News. “It’s an enormous project. The exposure here for the Trump administration is very real.”
The company in question is Vornado Realty Trust, a New York real estate firm whose founder and chairman is Steven Roth, a family friend, business partner and occasional adviser to Trump.
In fact, Trump gave Roth a key role in the president’s infrastructure advisory council and recently introduced Roth to a crowd in Cincinnati as one of “the greatest builders in America.”
ABC News reported:
Through business partnerships with both the Trump Organization and the Kushner Company, Roth’s firm has a level of financial codependence with the First Family that Connolly said could spark intense debate over the Trump administration’s handling of potential conflicts.
Vornado and The Trump Organization are jointly invested in two buildings — one in Manhattan and another in San Francisco. Vornado is also in the midst of active negotiations with the Kushner Company about the future of a troubled investment by Kushner’s family in a New York City skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue, according to a Kushner Co. spokesman. The company came to the rescue of the Kushners when it agreed to an arrangement that gave Vornado 49.5 percent of the office portion of the New York tower, and 70 percent of the retail space.
