SeattleTimes carrying a Feb. 7 WaPo feed:
$650 a night at Mar-a-Lago, $17,000 a month at Bedminster: What Trump’s company charges taxpayers for Secret Service lodging
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s company charges the Secret Service for the rooms agents use while protecting him at his luxury properties — billing U.S. taxpayers at rates as high as $650 per night, according to federal records and people who have seen receipts.
Those charges, compiled here for the first time, show that Trump has an unprecedented — and largely hidden — business relationship with his own government. When Trump visits his clubs in Palm Beach, Florida, and Bedminster, New Jersey, the service needs space to post guards and store equipment.
[...] Trump’s company billed the government even for days when Trump wasn’t there.
These payments appear to contradict the Trump Organization’s own statements about what it charges members of his government entourage. “If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Trump’s son Eric said last year in a Yahoo Finance interview.
The full extent of the Secret Service’s payments to Trump’s company is not known. The Secret Service has not listed them in public databases of federal spending, as is usually required for payments over $10,000.
Instead, documents have come out piecemeal, through public-records requests from news organizations and watchdog groups. The Washington Post compiled available records and found 103 payments from the Secret Service to Trump’s company dated between January 2017 and April 2018.
The records show more than $471,000 in payments from taxpayers to Trump’s companies. But — because these records cover only a fraction of Trump’s travel during a fraction of his term — the actual total is likely to be higher.
"If my father travels, . . .". Two generations of liars is enough. Shut that abuse down. It is theft from the nation; from every small taxpayer struggling to keep from drowning in debt. The man, and his children, seem conscienceless over money.
Even Bill Clinton was not that saucy with public money, and when he and Foundation struck, it was not a bit here and there up to half a million. Surely wife Hillary shook a different money tree for more; speeches at Goldman Sachs; but that stuff sunk because it stunk. Leading to "President Trump."