The Trump Organization Stiffed a Hotel. His Kids May Pay the Price.

Former President Donald Trump and his family company have a long history of stiffing contractors, but there’s one bill they almost certainly wish they had paid.

Ahead of the 2017 presidential inauguration, the Trump Organization reserved a block of rooms at the Loews Madison Hotel. When at least 13 people didn’t show up, the Trump Organization refused to pay the bill, something it has done many times in the past. The company then dodged a credit collection agency and eventually squirmed out of it by pushing the $49,358 bill off to the nonprofit presidential inaugural committee, the PIC.

That dodged payment is now the crux of the attorney general for the District of Columbia’s latest effort to put the Trump Organization back in its crosshairs in an ongoing investigation into how the Trump kids used the Presidential Inauguration Committee to throw lavish parties of their own.

“It was their friends. It should never have been sent to the PIC. That’s misuse of funding. The Trump Organization being involved in any way and getting the PIC to pay any sort of balance anywhere on their behalf? It just doesn’t seem legitimate,” said Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who coordinated inaugural events and is now the government’s lead witness in this case.

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Winston Wolkoff is no friend of the Trumps—any more. Although she was close to the family for more than a decade and eventually became “Trusted Adviser” to First Lady Melania Trump, there was a fallout after Winston Wolkoff felt that the Trump White House made her the scapegoat for inauguration misspending. The New York Times identified a company associated with her, WIS Media Partners, as the recipient of a whopping $26 million, and Winston Wolkoff later overcame Justice Department resistance to publication of her tell-all book called Melania and Me.

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine continues to investigate how the inauguration committee allegedly misspent more than $1 million and was allegedly used to essentially enrich Trump’s own company on his way into the White House. And the Attorney General’s office is trying to recover from a courtroom defeat late last year.

In November, D.C. Superior Court Judge José M. López seemed to doom the local attorney general’s investigation when he cut the Trump Organization loose from the lawsuit. His reasoning, which surprised those following the case, was that the family’s company wasn’t directly involved—even though Don Jr., Ivanka, and other staffers at the company’s New York office were on a lot of the paperwork. So he dropped the Trump Organization from the lawsuit.

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The judge’s Nov. 8 order hinged on the company’s claims that Texas financier Gentry Beach didn’t have the authority to list the Trump Organization when he pulled out an American Express credit card and made the large and expensive reservation. However, Beach was no…