NEW DELHI — In response to a query by a U.S. senator, the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi said Thursday that its staff did not advise or assist Donald Trump Jr. on a foreign policy address he is set to give Friday while on a private business trip to India.
The embassy was responding to questions about a letter released Wednesday by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., to the U.S. ambassador in India raising concerns about the embassy’s engagement with Trump Jr., who is in India for the week to promote various Trump real estate projects around the country — a trip that has already netted $15 million in sales on Monday alone, according to one of his local partners.
The embassy only provided routine support to his Secret Service detail, it said.
The president’s eldest son is set to give a foreign policy speech at a global business summit in New Delhi on Friday alongside India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and other high-ranking Indian government officials.
“I am concerned that Mr. Trump’s speech will send the mistaken message that he is speaking on behalf of the president, the administration or the United States government, not as a private individual, or that he is communicating official American policy,” wrote Menendez, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“Given the potential to confuse Mr. Trump’s private business visit with having an official governmental purpose, I write to ensure that the U.S. Embassy presence in India will have no role in supporting Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization during his time in India, other than that necessary to provide any security support for the U.S. Secret Service,” Menendez wrote.
A spokesman for U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Juster said that Trump is visiting the country as a “private citizen” and that the embassy had only provided routine support for his Secret Service detail, such as booking hotel rooms.
Juster is in the process of replying to the letter from Menendez, who had asked a series of questions including whether embassy staff had briefed or assisted Trump, what steps the embassy had taken to make it clear that Trump is not speaking on behalf of the government and whether the State Department or Bureau of Diplomatic Security had spent any funds on Trump’s trip.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Tuesday that Trump was in India as a “private citizen” and that she was not familiar with what was going to be in the speech or how it was put together.
The president’s eldest son, 40, is executive vice president of the Trump Organization, the global family real estate business that President Donald Trump still controls. The company has licensed its name to five real estate projects in India, including residential towers in Pune, Mumbai, Gurgaon and Kolkata and a proposed office tower also in Gurgaon, a suburb of India’s capital also known as Gurugram. Some of the Trump Organization’s local business partners have ties to prominent politicians and have been involved in tax and other investigations.
Trump Jr. has been spending the week in a variety of private lunches and dinners with potential buyers and local business leaders as well as enticing buyers to purchase residences in the latest Trump Towers project in Gurgaon, where luxury flats sell for as much as $1.6 million. Full-page glossy advertisements urged buyers paying a booking fee of about $38,000 by Thursday to “join Mr. Donald Trump Jr. for a conversation and dinner” on Friday. Kalpesh Mehta, one of the local developers, told reporters that they had already sold more than $100 million worth of real estate in the towers — $15 million alone on Monday, after the Trump Jr. dinner offer appeared in newspapers.
