Former President Donald Trump’s frequent trips to his properties ended up being the windfall that ethics experts long expected them to be, according to new documents obtained by Congress.
The records were obtained as part of an investigation by the Democrat-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is investigating how the Trump family profited from Donald Trump’s four years in power. The documents were released publicly on the committee’s website.
In one instance, Secret Service agents were billed $1,185 per night to stay at the president’s now-shuttered hotel in downtown Washington DC located at the historic Old Post Office building, just a few blocks from the White House itself.
“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,” wrote Oversight chairwoman Carolyn Maloney.
It’s unlikely that the Trump Organization will ever face any criminal accusations of wrongdoing over the arrangement, no matter how profitable it ends up being for the ex-president’s company which is now battling a major legal investigation of its own in New York state.
But it still directly contradicts the claim that Trump Organization executive VP Eric Trump made in 2019, at the height of his father’s frequent trips around the east coast to properties in Bedminster, New Jersey and West Palm Beach, Florida, among others.
“If my father travels, they stay at our properties free — meaning, like cost for housekeeping,” he said falsely at the time during an appearance at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit.
“So everywhere that he goes, if he stays at one of his places, the government actually spends, meaning it 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,” he went on.
Donald Trump’s long list of alleged violations of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which forbids public servants from profiting off of their work in office, was a top sore spot for critics throughout his presidency. Though the president put the Trump Organization into a blind trust controlled by his family, he remained the de facto leader of the Trump brand itself and would frequently spend days at a time golfing with various DC power brokers and others over weekend getaways to Bedminster or other properties.
The president never faced any actual consequences for those perceived violations thanks to the vagueness of the law itself; like many of the trappings of the presidency that Mr Trump either ignored or wholeheartedly defied, it has no clear enforcement measure and thereby allowed the president to evade any attempt to hold him accountable.
The House Oversight committee itself has no prosecutorial powers and can only issue a report detailing its findings regarding the issue — this will likely occur before the end of the year, when the new Congress (potentially one controlled by the GOP) is sworn in next January.
