After receiving a series of complaints, the U.S. State Department has pulled an article from its website about President Trump's Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort.
Originally posted on April 4th, the link to the article now leads to a webpage that reads: "The intention of the article was to inform the public about where the president has been hosting world leaders. We regret any misperception and have removed the post."
Share America removed the post on Monday after the State Department’s efforts to share the article drew criticism.
Democratic Senator (Oregon) Ron Wyden asked in a Twitter post why the State Department would spend taxpayer dollars promoting "the president's private country club."
Since the State Department's post, other outlets have picked up on the alleged tendency of Trump's "...foreign police team [to promote the "winter White House" as well.]" Politico reports that at least two U.S. embassies also circulated the blog post throughout April, promoting the Florida estate.
Allegedly, the United Kingdom and Albanian embassies posted the article, yet both of those links are now dead as well.
The blog post described the “dream deferred” when Mar-a-Lago’s original builder, Marjorie Merriweather Post, willed the property to the federal government upon her death in 1973.
The post’s author, Leigh Hartman, wrote, explaining how the government returned the property to Post’s trust because it cost too much money to maintain. Yet Trump bought the property and its furniture in 1985, and he opened it a decade later as a private club.
“Post’s dream of a winter White House came true with Trump’s election in 2016,” Hartman wrote.
Prior to the post being removed Monday, the ethics watchdog group American Oversight said it would file complaints with the State Department’s Inspector General and the Office of Government Ethics, and it also said it would write to Capitol Hill oversight panels urging them to launch their own investigations.