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Auction offering coffee with Ivanka Trump is canceled

Ivanka Trump. ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — An auction offering a 45-minute private meeting with Ivanka Trump in exchange for a charitable donation was abruptly canceled Friday after questions were raised about the process by ethics experts, who said it appeared to offer bidders special access to the next first family.

The auction had been running for 10 days, drawing 28 bids, the highest of which reached $72,888. The bidders included at least three businessmen who said in interviews that they saw their donation as an opportunity to press Trump for information about her father’s plans as president or to try to urge Donald Trump to take up an issue important to them.

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All information on the amounts and names of the bidders disappeared from the internet with no notice Friday afternoon. The winning bidder would have been an organization called Go Hydrogen, although no information could be found about this entity.

The Trump Organization said in a statement that the Trump family had waited to decide what to do about the auction until “our team was aligned on steps moving forward.” The money raised was set to go to the Eric Trump Foundation, run by Ivanka Trump’s younger brother, to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee.

“We wanted to handle this with proper discretion once this was brought to our attention,” said the statement, issued a day after The New York Times first asked about the matter.

Eric Trump issued a statement as well, expressing regret that the charity effort had to be called off. “Today, the only people that lost are the children of St. Jude,” his statement said.

But Meredith McGehee of the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington group that promotes ethics in government, said “there is no reason to have other people underwrite his charitable giving.”

“That is a deflection that misses the whole point,” McGehee said.

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Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump family, did not respond to a question over why Eric Trump did not personally donate the money.

Richard Painter, who served as an ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, said Ivanka Trump should not have been soliciting charitable donations from the public in exchange for special access, given the prominent role she has played in the transition effort and the prospect that she may serve as an informal adviser to her father’s administration with an office in the White House.

Federal employees would not be allowed to solicit a donation in exchange for special access, and neither the Bush nor Obama administrations allowed it, Painter and Norm Eisen, who served as an ethics lawyer in the Obama administration, said. Ivanka Trump is not scheduled to take a paid position in the White House, but Painter and Eisen said she should still honor the same standards.

“If she is going to be in the government and a power behind the throne she should observe the same ethics restrictions that other White House employees face,” Painter said.

For example, during the Bush administration, Painter said, White House staff members wanted to auction off a lunch there to raise money for their children’s schools, but he would not allow it, saying it violated the spirit of the rules.

Ivanka Trump had planned to have her coffee with the winning bidder either at Trump Tower in New York or the Trump International Hotel in Washington. But still this would have been inappropriate given the role that Trump is playing in setting up the new administration, Painter said.

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Eric Trump continues to operate the Eric Trump Foundation, which donates about $5 million a year to St. Jude and other causes. Painter said the first family should cease all such fundraising, no matter how noble the cause, or they could find themselves facing the same allegations that Hillary Clinton did over the Clinton Foundation.

For now, Eric Trump has a fundraiser scheduled in February at the Mar-a-Lago resort his father owns in Florida, where guests who donate $50,000 are given a “gold” status that offers them special access to the event.

“It sounds like a husband running a large charity while his wife is secretary of state, doesn’t it,” Painter said. “It is the exact same thing that the Trump family accused the Clintons of abusing.”