With the relationship between the Trump administration and the intelligence community deteriorating rapidly, on Wednesday the FBI decided to dump 400 pages of documents related to a 1970s housing discrimination case against the Trump family real estate company — a decades-old case that Democrats tried to use against Donald Trump during the presidential campaign as “evidence” that he was racist.
“The documents consist of interview notes, handwritten statements and FBI reports compiled during the bureau’s investigation, which occurred between 1972 and 1974,” explains the Daily Caller. “The FBI’s investigation centered on allegations that the Trump Management Company, which was owned by Trump’s father, Fred, discriminated against applicants for apartment rentals based on their race.”
The bureau’s investigation resulted in, well, not much. Trump Management never admitting any wrongdoing and ended up settling with the DOJ in 1975 and promising to rent to more minorities in the future.
So why release the documents now? Well, apparently the FBI has decided to begin releasing records of high-profile cases involving public figures, like Trump and the Clintons. TheDC notes that just a few weeks before the 2016 election, the bureau’s records division dumped files on Fred Trump, followed shortly thereafter by records of a 2001 investigation into Bill Clinton’s highly controversial pardon of billionaire fugitive Marc Rich.
Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon responded to the “odd” timing of the document dump, and even asked if the bureau would be releasing the Trump Management housing discrimination records:
Clearly the answer was yes, but just a little more belatedly than Fallon was likely hoping.
Democrat strategist David Axelrod also decried the move as more evidence that the “Federal Bureau of Intervention” was trying to interfere with the election:
TheDC highlights a few of the racial discrimination complaints included in the 400-page file:
“Fred Trump told me not to rent to blacks,” one rental supervisor who worked for Fred Trump in 1973 told an FBI special agent.
In Oct. 1974, a former doorman at a Trump property in Brooklyn described what he said was the Trump company’s anti-black policy.
He told investigators that a superintendent who worked for Fred Trump told him that he should tell any black applicants for apartments “that the rent was twice as much as it really was, in order that he could not afford the apartment.”