In the wake of the The New York Times' reporting in 2018, Winston Wolkoff tearily confided in Donald Trump's then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, about the inaugural committee's activities. Cohen secretly recorded the conversation, and the recording was seized by the FBI as part of its investigation into Cohen's unrelated conduct, according to Winston Wolkoff's account.
The recording offered federal authorities at least one new angle to pursue.
According to Winston Wolkoff, she started to realize there could be a problem with the committee's expenditures "when I saw that a tree you could buy for $10 was $1,000, or a stage that would cost $100,000 was $1 million."
"There were a lot of different people involved," she said.
In January, the attorney general for the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit that alleges the inaugural committee spent more than $1 million at the Trump International Hotel as part of a scheme "to enrich the Trump family."
In a statement at the time, Attorney General Karl Racine said his investigation found that Winston Wolkoff had "raised concerns" about the pending expenditures beforehand with the president-elect himself as well as Ivanka Trump, but they ignored them.