WaPo Reporter Reveals Legally ‘Dubious’ Way Trump Forced Through a No-Bid Contract for His Ballroom

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper spoke to Washington Post investigative reporter Jonathan O’Connell this week about his uncovering of the “secret agreement” behind the $500 million no-bid contract President Donald Trump is using to build his ballroom.

“What did you find in your reporting about how this no-bid contract was awarded?” Cooper began the interview.

O’Connell replied, “It’s actually a very creative strategy, Anderson, although legally sort of dubious. There is this tiny office in the White House called the Executive Residence, which is generally for small repairs to the White House — the president and his family’s home, that portion of the White House — doing furnishings and interior changes.”

“And they’ve used this very tiny office to contract the entire demolition and construction of the East Wing, rather than using these agencies that have big contracting operations and are used to following — and must follow — competitive bidding. So they’ve used this tiny office, that I had never heard of before we got into this and saw this contract, to develop this large construction project. And because it’s legally kind of questionable, they are now stuck; the construction has been paused,” he added.

Cooper followed up, “And you also report the president was directly involved in negotiating some of the costs for the project. How so?”

“Yes, we are still learning more about this for certain, but the specific part that he took an involvement in, according to the documents we’ve seen, is the price of concrete, because the general contractor used one of its own companies as a subsidiary. And according to the documents that we’ve seen, the president himself helped negotiate what the price for the concrete would be. This happened four or five days after the invasion of Iran, so obviously it was a priority for him because he spent personal time doing it,” O’Connell replied.

“He was negotiating the price of the concrete after which invasion?” asked Cooper for clarification.

O’Connell replied the Iran conflict as Cooper added, “Wow. Has the White House responded to your reporting?”

“They’ve answered some questions, not a lot of them. They don’t question any of the facts in our reporting at all,” O’Connell replied, adding:

It’s mostly a defense of the procedures used to get things going quickly. I mean, President Trump does want to see lots of projects around the nation’s capital happen quickly, and you’ve seen in a lot of these examples — including this arch that he’s trying to build in Lafayette Square in front of the White House and the East Wing — that he is willing to put his foot on the gas pedal and try to get things going as quickly as possible.

Now, he’s gotten tripped up in the courts a bunch of times. The Kennedy Center is a good example of that. But he wants to move quickly, and this is an example of where he is using this obscure contracting operation in order to quickly pick a contractor and get work going as fast as possible.

“The whole idea, though, of having bids — it’s pretty obvious — is to get good quality work at a good price, with competing bids where one company doesn’t know what other companies are bidding. That’s how work is normally done. He wants to rush it, and we’ve seen the results with the reflecting pool and others where it ends up kind of breaking down,” Cooper added.

“Yeah, I mean, anybody who has any work done on their house generally probably talks to more than one general contractor about how much the work might cost. And if you’re going to demolish part of your house, you might also have a plan for what will be replacing it — a plan that is approved and maybe finalized. That’s not the case here,” O’Connell explained, adding:

And also, as the president said in the clip that you just showed, a lot of it is not his money. Tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money is already being spent. And clearly, making sure that the cost was as low as possible and that the government and taxpayers got the best services possible is not a priority here. Otherwise, you would have used one of these normal contracting vehicles to go out and solicit the best price you could get and get the best service you could. In this case, the administration is not doing that. They’re going as fast as they can to get their approvals.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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