How Trump siphons U.S. tax dollars into his own company
President Trump’s company charged the Secret Service $157,000 more than was previously known — billing taxpayers for rooms at his clubs at rates far higher than his company has claimed, according to a new trove of receipts and billing documents released by the Secret Service.
Many of the new receipts were obtained by the watchdog group Public Citizen, which spent three years battling the Secret Service over a public-records request from January 2017.
When added to dozens of charges already reported by The Washington Post, the new documents show that Trump’s company has charged the Secret Service more than $628,000 since he took office in 2017.
The payments show Trump has an unprecedented — and still partially hidden — business relationship with his own government. The full scope of that relationship is still unknown because the publicly available records are largely from 2017 and 2018, leaving huge gaps in the data.
The new documents include bills from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., showing charges for 177 additional nightly room rentals in 2017, 2018 and 2019. The rate was $396.15 per night per room, the receipts show.
In Bedminster, N.J., the new receipts also show that a rental arrangement that began in summer 2017 — in which Trump’s club charged the Secret Service $17,000 per month to rent a cottage near the president’s — continued in summer 2018 and for at least part of summer 2019. That rate is unusually high for homes in the area, according to local rental listings.
Trump’s son Eric Trump, who is helping to run the Trump Organization while his father is in the White House, suggested in an interview last year with Yahoo Finance that the company charges a very low rate to federal employees accompanying the president.
“If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” said Eric Trump, the company’s executive vice president. Later in the interview, he said, “We charge them, like, 50 bucks.” [Continue reading…]