The US Secret Service was made to pay as much as $1,185 a night to stay at properties belonging to former president Donald Trump, a congressional committee said on Monday as it released documents that appeared to show the former president profiting from his protection details in and out of office.
All told, the Secret Service, which is mandated by law to protect the president and his family, spent $1.4m at Trump-owned properties in the US, according to records obtained by the Democratic-led House oversight committee as part of its investigation into Trump conflicts of interest.
“The exorbitant rates charged to the Secret Service and agents’ frequent stays at Trump-owned properties raise significant concerns about the former president’s self-dealing and may have resulted in a taxpayer-funded windfall for former president Trump’s struggling businesses,” the committee chair, the New York representative Carolyn Maloney, said in a statement.
The documents contradicted statements from the former president’s son Eric Trump.
In 2019, he claimed the Secret Service was charged “like, $50” for hotel rooms. The following year, he said: “We provide the rooms at cost and could make far more money renting them to members or guests.”
According to the House committee, between January 2017 and September 2021 there were at least 40 instances where the government paid room fees in excess of normal rates. The charges could be up to three times as much the per diem rate, Maloney wrote in a letter to the Secret Service director, Kimberly Cheatle.
The committee produced documents in which agents staying for protection purposes at properties including the Trump International Hotel in Washington and Mar-a-Lago in Florida repeatedly wrote “per diem rates could not be obtained”.
The committee began investigating potential entanglements between Trump businesses and the activities of the president in February 2020.
It noted: “The Secret Service’s productions have been incomplete and do not provide the committee with a complete picture of its spending at Trump-owned properties.”
