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WASHINGTON — The Trump Organization charged the Secret Service up to $1,185 per night for hotel rooms used by agents protecting former President Donald Trump and his family, according to documents released Monday by the House Oversight Committee, forcing a federal agency to pay well above government rates.
The committee released Secret Service records showing more than $1.4 million in payments by the department to Trump properties since Trump took office in 2017. The committee said that the accounting was incomplete, however, because it did not include payments to Trump’s foreign properties — where agents accompanied his family repeatedly — and because the records stopped in September 2021.
The records that the panel managed to obtain provided new details about an arrangement in which Trump and his family effectively turned the Secret Service into a captive customer of their business — by visiting their properties hundreds of times and then charging the government rates far above its usual spending limits for their protectors to follow.
The records also make clear that Trump’s son Eric — who ran the family business while his father was in office — provided a misleading account of what his company was charging.
In 2019, Eric Trump said the Trump Organization charged the government only “like $50” for hotel rooms during presidential visits.
Instead, records obtained by the committee showed, the Trump International Hotel in Washington repeatedly charged the Secret Service rates more than $600 per night. In one case, the hotel charged the Secret Service $1,160 a night for a room used while protecting Eric Trump in 2017.
The same year, the records showed, Trump’s hotel in Washington charged the service $1,185 for a room used while guarding Donald Trump Jr.
“Per diem rates could not be obtained,” a Secret Service record said, referring to the government’s official maximum rate. By law, the department is allowed to exceed those maximum payments when its protective mission requires.
“What gets me is, over and over again, how they just lie about this stuff,” said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y., chair of the Oversight Committee. “Documents don’t lie.”
On Monday, Eric Trump issued a statement saying that the Trump Organization “would have been substantially better off if hospitality services were sold to full-paying guests.” He did not address the discrepancy between the rates he claimed the company had charged and the rates shown in the record.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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