Trump Corrupts the Secret Service to Service His Own Income

The Editorial Board at the Washington Post wrote an opinion piece about how the president has tried to hide how much money US taxpayers are overpaying for government employees to stay at his expensive resorts. The president has been fighting against information requests like this since January of 2017. That was the month the president was sworn into office. It's been stonewalling to hide the depth and scope of his corruption for his personal profit at our expense.

The editors write: “AFTER A Post investigation showed the Secret Service being charged high rates to stay at Trump Organization properties while guarding President Trump, his son Eric, who helps run the company while his father is in the White House, disputed the account. “I joke all the time,” he said Feb. 14 on “Fox News Rundown,” “that I would like nothing more than to never have another person from the government stay at one of our properties because it displaces a true paying guest.” He suggested the company is actually doing the government a favor in what it charges, claiming it has lost “a fortune.”

Turns out the joke is on U.S. taxpayers.

Documents recently released by the Secret Service to the watchdog group Public Citizen in response to a three-year-old public record request reveal that Mr. Trump’s company charged the Secret Service $157,000 more than had previously been known, billing the agency for rooms at Mar-a-Lago and other clubs at rates higher than his company had claimed. Previous reporting by Post reporters who had pieced together receipts from other public record requests identified $471,000 worth of payments, bringing the new known total to about $628,000. Most of the spending detailed so far in the publicly available records is from 2017 and 2018, so the full extent of what the Trump Organization is charging — in an unprecedented business relationship between a president and his own government — is still unknown.

‘That is not how the process is supposed to work. Responding in 2020 with information from 2017 and 2018 is not okay,’ said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. Indeed. Why has there been such secrecy? The Secret Service has failed to include payments in public databases, as has been past practice, and has not filed the required reports of its spending to Congress. The Trump Organization has refused to provide information, and its claims — ‘If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,’ said Eric Trump last year — have been proved false.

One of the more revealing — and disturbing — details to emerge from reporting on this matter by ProPublica centered on the difference in the room rate charged to Secret Service agents and to an employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs. The non-Secret Service government employee — unlike the Secret Service — had to adhere to government limits on hotel rates and paid less than half of what was charged to the Secret Service. For the same night.”

Corruption, sleaze and lies

The brazenness of the president's lies and self serving corruption are not just staggering hypocrisy. It is both deeply immoral and deeply insulting to Americans who are forced to overpay to support the president's personal income. What is even more troubling, it apparently is legal. What the president has done over the last three years is plainly show just how weak to non-existent defenses of democracy, the rule of law, honest governance, ethics and transparency really are.

Both parties, democratic and republican (now the Trump Party), are fully responsible for their massive, inexcusable failures to install laws that heavily penalize the kind of corruption and authoritarian behavior that the president gets away with. These matters should have been dealt with decades ago.

American taxpayers have been deceived, betrayed and stolen from by a corrupt, incompetent two-party system. Their failures are unforgivable.

And, there's this