WASHINGTON —

The Trump Organization has reached a deal with the investment fund CGI Merchant Group to purchase the lease for the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., for $375 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The Miami group is expected to remove the Trump name from the ornate building located a short walk from the White House and is partnering with Hilton Worldwide Holdings to brand it a Waldorf Astoria, according to the person familiar. The deal is subject to approval by the General Services Administration (GSA), which will conduct a 60-day review, because the federal government owns the property.

Related video above: Trump Hotel was sued in 2020 for overcharging for events, throwing private parties using nonprofit funds

The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the deal.

The CGI Merchant Group declined to comment to CNN. CNN has reached out to the Trump Organization for comment.

Former President Donald Trump's company had been in advanced talks with CGI Merchant Group this fall to sell the lease of the hotel, CNN previously reported.

Last month, the House Oversight Committee released documents showing the D.C. property, which attracted conservative lobbyists throughout the Trump presidency, lost $70 million while he was in office. The former President had publicly claimed the hotel was making more than tens of millions of dollars.

The company has been trying to sell the property since 2019 but paused last year when the pandemic all but shuttered the hospitality industry.

The GSA, which manages federal buildings and land, awarded the lease for the Old Post Office building in 2012. Trump opened the hotel in 2016, when he was the Republican nominee for president.

Since then, the House Oversight Committee had been investigating conflicts of interest regarding GSA's management of the Trump hotel lease.

When he took office, Trump resigned from his companies but transferred his assets to a trust run by his sons, allowing him to still benefit financially from the D.C. hotel and his other businesses.

In 2019, the inspector general of the GSA said the agency "ignored the Constitution" when deciding to maintain the lease of the building to the hotel after Trump was elected to the White House.

The documents released by the Oversight Committee showed the hotel received millions from foreign governments in payments and loan deferral, which Trump did not disclose, raising questions about potential conflicts of interest during his presidency.

The disclosure marked the first time that congressional investigators had reviewed and released details of the former President's financial information, though the Trump Organization had challenged the committee's understanding of accounting and denied any wrongdoing.

Bitcoin rallied to a record Wednesday, topping $66,000 for the first time, amid a wave of excitement about how the financial establishment increasingly accepts the digital currency's rise.

Bitcoin was trading at $66,439, up 5.9%, as of 12:40 p.m. ET, after earlier climbing as high as $66,974.77.

It has roared back after sinking below $30,000 during the summer to top its prior record set in April. That previous all-time high was nearly $64,889, according to CoinDesk.

The surge has come as more businesses, professional investors, and even the government of El Salvador buy into Bitcoin, further broadening its base beyond its initial core of fanatics.

 

The latest converts came into the world of crypto on Tuesday, when the first exchange-traded fund linked to Bitcoin found massive interest from investors.

Shares of the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF changed hands 24.1 million times in a resounding debut.

ProShares, an exchange trading company, listed an ETF that tracks Bitcoin futures on the New York Stock Exchange, the New York Times reported.

“2021 will be remembered for this milestone,” said Michael Sapir, the C.E.O. of ProShares, in an interview with the news outlet.

It was off to another strong start Wednesday, with volume topping 19.6 million within the first three hours of trading.

The ETF doesn’t invest directly in Bitcoin. It instead invests in the futures market tied to Bitcoin, but the industry sees the ETF bringing in a new class of investors.

Someone with an old-school brokerage account can buy the ETF, for example, without opening a trading account for crypto.

Investors are getting more interested in Bitcoin because they always look for assets whose prices move independently of everything else in their portfolios.

One school of thought says Bitcoin can offer investors protection from high inflation, and some fans see it as akin to “digital gold,” though it doesn't have a long track record to back that up.

More high-minded fans say digital assets are simply the future of finance, allowing transactions to sidestep intermediaries and fees with a currency that’s not beholden to any government.

Cryptocurrencies are still very far from winning over everyone, though. Critics point to how they're still not widely used as forms of payment. They also criticize how much energy is used by the cryptosystem, which adds to climate-changing emissions.

The biggest threat, meanwhile, is all the regulatory scrutiny shining on it.

Veronica De La Cruz at Newsy first reported this story.