By Richard Cowan and Alexandra Ulmer
WASHINGTON, Sept 15 (Reuters) - Democrats in the U.S. Congress launched an investigation this week into reports that a Russian oligarch paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the wedding celebrations of President Donald Trump's son earlier this year.
The Democrats' move comes on the heels of an article by ProPublica that Umar Kremlev, a wealthy Russian businessman and president of the International Boxing Association, paid for wedding festivities for Donald Trump
Jr. in the Bahamas in May.
The report said that Kremlev has close ties to the Russian government.
"Why is a Russian oligarch and friend of Vladimir Putin financially supporting the President's son? What does Umar Kremlev expect in return for funding this three-day wedding in the Bahamas?" Representative Robert Garcia wrote on Tuesday in a social media post.
Garcia is the senior Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and is expected to chair the panel if Democrats win a majority in the House of Representatives in November's midterm elections.
A representative for Don Jr declined to comment.
His wife, Bettina Trump, said in an Instagram post on Monday that Kremlev was a friend who had extended an "extraordinarily generous wedding gift," stressing that Kremlev had paid for two after-parties, not the wedding itself.
Kremlev and the IBA did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
The president, who did not attend his son's wedding, said in a statement that he did not know Kremlev and that the wedding controversy was "not a big deal!"
Aides to Republican Representative James Comer of Kentucky, who chairs the committee, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Garcia and other leading House Democrats already have been gearing up for probes into Trump, his family and ethics questions that have arisen since the start of the president's second term in January 2025.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York on Tuesday called the wedding arrangement "so corrupt, so venal, so endangering our national security."
In a speech to the Senate, Schumer added, "You’re dealing with a Russian oligarch, not just a cousin who’s giving you a gift...sometimes a wedding gift is a bribe from a foreign autocrat."
(Reporting by Richard Cowan and Alexandra Ulmer; additional reporting by Nandita Bose; Editing by Michael Learmonth and Cynthia Osterman)
