National Park Service personnel did not exploit the size of the crowd at President Donald Trump's inauguration, nor did agency staff discuss with the media a call from the president to acting Park Service Director Mike Reynolds that day, an Interior Department investigation has concluded.

President Trump and his staff maintained that the crowd at his inauguration was one of the largest ever -- " I looked out the field was, it looked like a million, a million and half people," the president said the day after his inauguration. -- but photos released by the Park Service showed that the crowds for both of President Obama's elections were larger.

Interior's Office of Inspector General looked into the matter after an unidentified individual complained that National Park Service "officials and employees took questionable actions during and after the 58th presidential inauguration ceremony." Specifically, the complaint alleged:

• That an NPS National Mall and Memorial Parks (NAMA) official instructed NPS employees to alter records related to crowd size estimates for the inauguration ceremony. 
• That two NPS public affairs employees released information to the press, without authorization, about a January 21, 2017, phone call from President Donald Trump to Acting NPS Director Michael Reynolds.
• That one of the public affairs employees circumvented the NPS chain of command for the inauguration when responding to a request from Reynolds. (although the complainant did not know what Reynolds requested, we determined that Reynolds asked the public affairs employee to help obtain inauguration photographs after the President requested them during the January 21 phone call).
• That a NAMA employee assigned to the inauguration engaged in personal activities at work that interfered with the performance of his duties.

"We did not find evidence to substantiate any of these allegations," the OIG report released Monday concluded. "All of the witnesses we interviewed denied that the (National Mall) official instructed staff to alter reports on the inauguration or to remove crowd size information. We also found no evidence that the public affairs employees released any information to the media about the president’s phone call, or that the employee who responded to Reynolds’ request was required to go through the chain of command."

President Obama's 2009 inauguration/NPS

President Obama's 2013 inauguration/NPS

President Trump's 2017 inauguration/NPS

The complainant, whose identify was not disclosed under guidelines of the Privacy Act, had charged that a National Mall official had ordered staff to "scrub" attendance numbers from President Trump's inauguration. However, it long has been Park Service policy not to provide crowd estimates.

"The official told us that she instructed the staff not to include crowd size estimates in the reports because she wanted to make sure that the reports did not contain nonfactual references to crowd size," the OIG report noted. "She explained that the NPS did not have the necessary methodology in place to do an accurate crowd count and, since the Million Man March in 1995, had made it a practice not to collect or provide any crowd size information for events held at the National Mall."

Had the complainant been aware of this practice, they would not have raised the issue, the report added.

The OIG investigation also could not substantiate the charge that Park Service public affairs personnel had released word that the president had called Mr. Reynolds about the inauguration crowd.

"Reynolds and NPS National Capital Region Director Bob Vogel told us that knowledge of the phone call was widespread throughout the NPS, since the initial call from the White House came in to the U.S. Park Police operations center," the OIG report pointed out, adding that, "Reynolds stated that he did not consider his conversation with the president protected information."

The OIG report was provided to acting Director Reynolds.