Trump hotels charging Secret Service nearly $400/night for rooms: Public Citizen

Properties owned by President Trump in New Jersey and Florida have charged the Secret Service more than $140,000 for lodging and other rooms, according to documents released Thursday by a watchdog group.

Public Citizen said the Secret Service paid an “at cost” rate of $396.15 for 135 nights of lodging at the president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2017 and 2018, for a total of $53,000 at that resort.

“These bills, paid by U.S. taxpayers, contradict a statement by Trump’s son Eric in an October 2019 interview, in which Eric Trump claimed that Trump’s ownership of properties ’saves a fortune’ for the U.S. government,” the group said in a statement.

Eric Trump estimated that the government was paying about $50 per night for the rooms.

“Trump treats the presidency as a self-enrichment scheme,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “Slowly, we’re beginning to learn the size of the bill to taxpayers. It should be crystal clear that this particular ploy is by no means ’saving a fortune’ as Eric Trump preposterously claimed.”

The documents were disclosed by the Secret Service after a three-year public records battle.

“Aggressive use of federal public records law has been crucial to Public Citizen’s efforts to hold the Trump administration accountable over the past three years,” said Patrick Llewellyn, an attorney with Public Citizen. “This work requires diligence, patience and often lots of time, but it enables us to make the government more transparent and accountable to the people.”

The Washington Post previously reported that taxpayers spent about $87,000 over 147 days to rent a cottage at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., for the Secret Service. The cost of that New Jersey property rental was typically $567 per day.

When Joseph R. Biden was vice president, he charged the government $2,200 per month — a little over $73 per day — for the Secret Service to rent a cottage on the Bidens’ Wilmington, Delaware, property for agents to provide on-site protection.