An environmental group is looking for evidence of collusion after a private vendor previously sold Trump Winery wine from a shop in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park.
The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Park Service (NPS) Tuesday, searching for evidence the agency or Department of the Interior was involved in Delaware North’s decision to sell Trump wine in the park, The Hill reports.
“The wine is not being sold by Shenandoah National Park, but rather by Delaware North Corporation, the park’s licensed concessioner,” a NPS spokesperson said in a statement given to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “The National Park Service authorizes concessioners to sell categories of retail goods and products like t-shirts, baseball hats, and in this case wine. However, the NPS does not specify what brands of these products should be sold.”
CBD senior attorney Bill Snape is skeptical, however.
“It absolutely raises conflict of interest concerns,” Snape told The Hill. “To me, the ultimate question was: whose idea was it to sell Trump wine? Did Delaware North just all of the sudden, on its own, decide it wanted to sell Trump wine?” Snape said.
Trump Winery is located about 40 miles from the closest entrance to Shenandoah National Park.
“Primarily, we try to buy from Virginia,” Delaware North Shenandoah store manager Mark Leach told The Hill, describing how he chooses what products to sell. “[NPS and park managers] ask that we carry regional products as much as possible.”
Delawar North’s Shenandoah stores carried the wine throughout 2016 and for a couple months earlier in 2017, but Leach decided to stop selling it because “we just didn’t want to get involved with [politics].”
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