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The Trump Organization on some occasions charged the Secret Service more than five times the government rate to stay at Donald Trump-owned properties while the agency was protecting him and his family, according to documents obtained by Congress.
In total the Secret Service spent at least $1.4 million in tax dollars at Trump Organization hotels and other properties over 669 expenditures between January 2017 and September 2021, House Committee on Oversight and Reform Chair Carolyn Maloney wrote in a Monday letter to Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service.
Maloney, D-N.Y., wrote in her letter to Cheatle that the Secret Service had provided only partial accounting of when its agents had stayed at Trump properties and how much the agents paid.
Some of the trips were while agents were accompanying Trump’s children Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, according to Maloney.
The oversight committee requested documents and details on the agency’s Trump spending in 2020, citing «disturbing» news reports of «exorbitant charges» by the former president’s properties.
Donald Trump did not divest himself of his businesses when he took office, though he said his sons were in charge — an arrangement that has drawn scrutiny and criticism from Democrats and ethics experts ever since.
According to the records the Secret Service has since provided the oversight committee, Maloney wrote Monday, «the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service a nightly rate in excess of the government per diem rate at least 40 times from the beginning of the Trump Administration through September 15, 2021. In several instances, the rates charged were more than three times the per diem rate.
