The Trump administration created a special challenge coin featuring President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, The New York Times reported Sunday.
The White House Communications Agency, a military unit that designs and creates the coins, created the Mar-a-Lago coin in recent months.
The group has also designed coins featuring Pope Francis and Trump, and killed plans for a coin featuring Trump Tower in Manhattan and the president’s golf course in Bedminster, N.J. after the Times asked about the coins.
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The agency — the same group that created a highly publicized coin for Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un — also created a “Make America Great Again” coin that was funded by the Republican National Committee, according to the Times.
Challenge coins are often created to mark presidential trips or events.
Ethics watchdogs told the Times that coins depicting Trump’s properties shouldn’t be created with government resources, as it could violate federal laws banning the use of public resources to promote private institutions.
White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters told the Times that the ethics rules didn’t apply to the Mar-a-Lago coins as private staffers in the military unit funded the coins privately and that “no public funds were used” to produce them.
Karen Brazell, the chief of staff for the White House Military Office, which oversees the agency, declined to comment to the Times about whether agency resources were used to create the coins.
Walters told the newspaper that Trump and his staff were not involved in “the creation, design, distribution or funding” of the agency coins, but that Trump “is involved in the selection and design of his official presidential challenge coins.”