WHAT US TAXPAYERS PAY FOR TRUMP TO STAY AT TRUMP PROPERTIES

Mar-A-Lago is where Trump’s Secret Service pays $650.00 per night 

Trump continues to tell lies, sometimes over 100 times each day

The Washington Post (The Post) has a Fact Checking group.  This is an operation that was not required at The Post until Donald Trump became president.

As of today, in the president’s first 1,000 days as president, he has told over 14,000 lies or mis-leading statements.

The Post now reports that some of those mis-statements are in what he says about how much they bill the US taxpayers for the rooms the Secret Service agents use while protecting him at his luxury properties.

When Trump visits his clubs in Palm Beach, Fla., and Bedminster, N.J., the service needs space to post guards and store equipment.  Those charges show that Trump has an unprecedented, and largely hidden business relationship with his own government.  President Trump’s company charges the Secret Service and bills the US taxpayers at rates as high as $650 per night.  This is according to federal records that The Post has been able to see due to the “Freedom of Information Act”.

In addition, they have been able to see some of the actual receipts for these charges.

Trump’s company still says it charges only minimal fees. But the Secret Service records show some of the truth, and it’s not a minimal charge.

As an example, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, the Secret Service was charged the $650 per room rate dozens of times in 2017, and a different rate, $396.15, per room dozens more times in 2018, according to the documents from Trump’s visits.

At the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, the Secret Service was charged $17,000 a month to use a three-bedroom cottage on the property.  This is an unusually high rent for even luxury homes in that area. This is according to receipts from 2017.  Trump’s company billed the government even for days when Trump wasn’t even there.

One of the Trump lies comes from his own son.  These payments totally contradict the Trump Organization’s own statements about what it charges members of his government entourage. “If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free… meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Trump’s son Eric said this lie in a Yahoo Finance interview just last year.  If Eric was correct, since they pay ~$12.00 per hour for housekeeping, that means that it takes 98 housekeeping employees per week to clean the three bedroom cottage.

The full extent of the Secret Service’s payments to Trump’s company is unfortunately, not known. The Secret Service has not listed them in public databases of federal spending, as is usually required for payments over $10,000.  Instead, documents have come out piecemeal, through public records requests from news organizations and watchdog groups. The Washington Post compiled available records and found 103 payments from the Secret Service to Trump’s company dated between January 2017 and April 2018.

That records show more than $471,000 in payments from taxpayers to Trump’s companies. But, because these records only cover a fraction of Trump’s travel during a fraction of his term, the actual total is obviously much higher.

“It is more than a little disconcerting, knowing this is going on, and not knowing what the actual numbers are,” said Jordan Libowitz, of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “That’s kind of crazy that we know the president is benefiting from the presidency, and we do not know how much. We do not know how many taxpayer dollars are going into his pockets.”

As expected, the White House did not respond to any questions about these payments.

Trump still owns his company, and he is the only president to not put his business in a blind trust, while he is president.  There is not a law requiring this, but it is a common reaction when an American is elected to the highest office in the land.  In response to questions from The Post, a company spokesperson said Mar-a-Lago does not charge the Secret Service $650 per room, but they did not address whether it had charged that rate in the past. The company also noted that the  $17,000 rental cottage at Bedminster contains “multiple rooms and that it includes numerous common spaces, such as a kitchen.”

The Trump company refused to answer questions about the rates it charges the Secret Service today.

“We provide the rooms at cost, and could make far more money renting them to members or guests,” Trump Organization Executive Vice President Eric Trump said in a statement. He gave no details about how the company calculates that “at-cost” price.

According to the books, that was another blatant Trump family lie.

If you will recall, during the 2016 campaign, Trump told voters that, if he was elected, he would not have time for travel, or for golf.

Just one more lie.  Trump complained about President Obama's playing golf, and he said as president, he wouldn't have time for golf.  So Far, in his first year, Trump played more golf than Obama did in 8 years.

Per 2015 Campaigner Trump: “I would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done,” Trump told The Hill publication in a June 2015 interview. “I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.”  However, since taking office, Trump has spent more than 342 days, a third of his entire presidency, at his private clubs and hotels, according to a tally by The Post.  Trump has said he works during these trips. 

However, it appears that most of his “work” time at his privates residences is for writing “Tweets” to his base supporters.

It is required that the Secret Service always comes with Trump, as it does with all presidents.  But the Trump Organization has assured the public that it is giving the government a great deal. Last year, Eric Trump told Yahoo Finance that when his father does visit his properties, he is legally required to charge something.  Another Trump family lie.

But of course, Eric Trump did not say what law required Trump to charge his own government, and the Secret Service did not respond to questions asking what law he was referring to. The Secret Service is part of the Department of Homeland Security, whose internal directives state “DHS may accept “gifts” to carry out program functions.”

Therefore, they could legally not charge for the use of the property.

The truth is that the president could tell his sons to not charge the Secret Service anything when they stay at a Trump property.  But of course, that would not be appropriate for the Mob Bosses of the Trump family.

As proof of this, “If [Dad] he stays at one of his places, the government actually . . . saves a fortune because, if they were to go to a hotel across the street, they’d be charging them $500 a night, whereas, you know we charge them, like 50 bucks,” Eric Trump said.

That is just flat-ass wrong.

It is appearing that the Secret Service has been involved with this supporting of the Trump family.

The Secret Service is required to tell Congress twice a year about what it spends to protect Trump at his properties.  That means that there should be 6 reports for Trump’s three years in the White House.

But since 2016, it has only filed two of the required six reports.  This is according to the congressional offices.

The reasons, according to Secret Service officials: key personnel have left the service and nobody picked up the job.  (I wonder why they left, and why nobody took over…..Hmmmmm?)

And guess what?  Even in those two reports that were submitted, the lines for Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago were completely blank.  That’s the two most popular places where the president has been staying over the last three years.

Senate Democrats have asked the Trump administration to provide more details on the costs of Trump’s travel as part of negotiations over a bill governing the Secret Service.  But of course, the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has told the Senate committee that he opposes a requirement to deliver those details until December 2020.  That just happens to fall after the 2020 election.

Another hmmm?

“They’ve really stonewalled us,” said Senator Tom Udall (D-N.M.). “He’s trying to hide the details from the public, because he knows how bad it looks. That’s the truth of it. He’s a billionaire, but we’re spending millions of dollars to support his for-profit clubs and for-profit businesses.”

The Post sought to quantify one part of that spending — the money that goes directly to Trump’s own businesses.  Most of the 103 payments discovered by The Post went to just three Trump properties: the Trump International Hotel in Washington and the president’s clubs at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster.

They showed that Trump had quickly shattered past precedent. Other recent presidents have allowed the Secret Service to use their properties, George H.W. Bush’s compound in Maine, Bill Clinton’s home in suburban New York, George W. Bush’s ranch in Texas, all for free, this is according to the Secret Service and the spokespeople for those former presidents.

The Post could find only one other recent example of a president or vice president charging his own Secret Service rent. Former vice president Joe Biden charged $2,200 a month for a cottage on his property in Delaware. Unlike the payments to Trump, Biden’s payments were listed in public spending databases. Biden was paid a total of $171,600 over six years.

Okay, so Biden got $171,600 over 6 years.  FYI: The records show that Trump had exceeded that total within three months.

In one visit alone in 2017, Trump spent triple the normal limit on federal spending for a hotel room in the Miami, which was $182. It was even more than what the State Department paid for rooms at Mar-a-Lago around the same time, which was $520.  The total cost on that one trip was $5546.

“The operational needs of the Secret Service can differ from those in the Department of State,” a Secret Service spokeswoman said, to explain why their rooms had cost more than the State Department’s.  Presidents are exempt from federal conflict-of-interest rules. And the Secret Service is exempt from hotel-room spending limits.

So, Trump knows that Trump’s company was free to charge whatever it wanted.

And, according to one former senior administration official with direct knowledge of the operation, his club often treated the Secret Service like any other customer. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships with the Trump administration.

“The club wanted to charge the rack rate,” the former official said, saying that sometimes officials had to call Eric Trump to lobby for a lower rate. “The club managers were not always very accommodating.”

In Bedminster, records show, the Secret Service went further: It paid not by the day, but for a whole month at a time. The Secret Service rented the club’s “Sarazen Cottage,” the expensive three-bedroom building near Trump’s own villa, from July 1 to Oct. 1, 2017.

The former senior administration official said the cottage was needed to store equipment and provided living space for five or six agents. So, even though Trump was only there about a third of the time, the equipment was there every day. So they paid full price for every day, just for the equipment

“You can’t rent the cottage for part of the year to someone else because it has to stay as Secret Service space,” said an official.

The many gaps in the Secret Service data leave many unanswered questions.

Among them: Why were these payments to Trump’s clubs not listed in public databases of federal spending, such as usaspending.gov? The Secret Service has publicly listed many other transactions related to Trump’s stays at his clubs, rentals of golf carts, tents and portable toilets, but not the rooms.

And it has not listed any of these payments to Trump’s own businesses.

Also: Why did the Secret Service spend so much at Trump’s D.C. hotel, a place where, unlike Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago, Trump has not stayed overnight since taking office? 

In response to records request at NBC News, the Department of Homeland Security released a listing of 39 payments there, during Trump’s first year, totaling $159,000, and he has never stayed there.

The documents do not give the reasons for those payments, or do they give the rate that Trump’s company charged.

As with all the things Trump.  When this is all over, the bill for having Trump as the US president will be in the billions of dollars, not to mention what his other government screw-ups that are today being paid by the US public.

Copyright G. Ater 2020