By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 22, 2024 ~
Today, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is scheduled to conduct a hearing on the conduct of the Secret Service in preparing for the Donald Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, July 13. At the rally, a 20-year old sniper was able to fire on the President and the crowd from a nearby rooftop, resulting in one death and two serious injuries requiring hospitalization. The President sustained a reported grazing of the ear, but was able to walk away. The sniper was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper team on a nearby rooftop.
Right wing Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have a widely-reported agenda. They want the Director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, to resign in disgrace. If past is prologue, Director Cheatle will be subjected to a barrage of insults and indignities by MAGA Republicans at today’s hearing.
Apart from a 4-year stint as Senior Director of Global Security at PepsiCo, Cheatle has been with the Secret Service since 1995. Clearly her work was exemplary to earn her the appointment to Director in September 2022.
No hearing on the Trump rally matter would be complete without a thorough understanding of how Donald Trump used the Secret Service and affiliated agencies to pad the profits of his businesses while President of the United States. He now appears to want to shift much of the cost of his giant public campaign rallies to the U.S. taxpayer as well.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the investigative and auditing arm of Congress. In January 2019, the GAO published a report on the astronomical costs that were being incurred to attend to the travel needs of a billionaire president and his jet-setting adult children. The GAO found that in just a four-week span of February 3 through March 5, 2017, taxpayers spent $13.6 million protecting the President on four trips to his luxury resort and residence, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida. That works out to $3.4 million per trip. Multiply that by the 145 trips the President took to Mar-a-Lago during his four years as President and you’re looking at a $495 million taxpayer tab.
Why is it so costly for the U.S. Secret Service to protect the President? Because it’s not the only federal agency involved in the protection of the President when he travels. According to the GAO report linked above, costs involved in just those four trips to Mar-a-Lago are broken down as follows: $8.5 million for the Department of Defense for operating aircraft — Air Force One and Marine Corps One; $5 million for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), broken down as $1.6 million for the Secret Service and $3.4 million for the U.S. Coast Guard.
Why is the U.S. Coast Guard involved in protecting the President at his luxury resort at Mar-a-Lago? Because it’s on the water and accessible to attack from public waterways.
Donald Trump has had five children by three different wives. All of his children, including his adult children who continued to cut business deals for him while he was President, were under the enormously expensive protection of the Secret Service while Trump was President. When Ivanka flew to Aspen or Whistler to ski, the taxpayer picked up the tab for protection. When sons Eric and Don, Jr. were cutting business deals for the family business in foreign lands, the U.S. taxpayer picked up the tab for protection.
On April 10, 2020, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) disclosed the following:
“While previous presidents have separated themselves from their assets and placed them in a blind trust, President Trump appointed his two adult sons to manage the international businesses that continue to make hundreds of millions of dollars a year on his behalf. The Trump family’s extremely high number of protected trips can be partially explained by the fact that Eric and Don Jr. have traveled the world promoting Trump-branded businesses throughout the Trump presidency. This explanation does less to settle concerns than to highlight the extent to which the American people are subsidizing the Trump family business…
“CREW has uncovered the Secret Service costs for several Trump family business trips that help to piece together the tab that the Trump family has accumulated with taxpayers. In February 2017, Eric and Don Jr. flew to Dubai to open a Trump-branded golf club, which cost the Secret Service more than $200,000. The same month, Eric flew to the Dominican Republic to potentially relaunch a failed Trump-branded resort project, which cost $20,000. Eric Trump has visited Uruguay twice for Trump Organization business, costing taxpayers $97,830 in 2017,and $80,786 in 2019. And those are just the receipts we have obtained so far. What we do know is that the President’s frequent trips to Trump branded properties put taxpayer money directly into the coffers of the Trump Organization.”
But that barely scratches the surface of the grifting. On October 17, 2022, the same House Committee that is holding today’s hearing, released a letter from its then Chair, Carolyn Maloney, to Secret Service Director Cheatle. Maloney revealed that the Committee had unearthed the following documented information:
“Despite claims by the Trump Organization that federal employees traveling with the former President would stay at Trump properties ‘for free’ or ‘at cost,’ new information obtained by the Committee shows that the former President’s company charged the Secret Service excessive nightly rates on dozens of trips. These rates were as high as $1,185 per room per night, more than five times the government [approved] rate.”
Let that sink in for a moment. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2020, the last year of Trump’s presidency, there were 37.2 million Americans living below the poverty level – while the Trump administration was paying $1,185 per night for a luxury room at a Trump property – in order for a public servant to keep the President safe. But even this barely captures the outrage.
When the Trump administration was coming to a close in 2020, Trump directed that the Secret Service extend protection to his adult children and their spouses for another six months. CREW obtained the relevant documents and calculated that taxpayers picked up at least another $1 million for the added protection.
Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, appears to have used his time after Trump lost the election in November of 2020, making three trips to the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. Kushner would later come under scrutiny for obtaining a $2 billion investment for his fledgling money management firm, the Affinity Fund, from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia in mid 2021.
The New York Times (paywall) reported that the Saudi wealth fund had ignored warnings from its advisors to steer clear of Kushner’s investment fund, writing:
“Those objections included: ‘the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management’; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for ‘the bulk of the investment and risk’; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them ‘unsatisfactory in all aspects’; a proposed asset management fee that ‘seems excessive’; and ‘public relations risks’ from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump….”
But it’s not just the federal taxpayer’s dime that was, and is, being used to protect Donald Trump – who remains under Secret Service protection as a former President. Local police departments and State police spent tens of thousands of dollars on protection while Trump was in office and continue to spend tens of thousands of dollars to provide protection at Trump’s campaign rallies.
Under Title 18, Section 3056 of the U.S. Code, the U.S. Secret Service is authorized to provide protection at certain events that are designated as “National Special Security Events.” According to the Secret Service’s 2023 Annual Report, the only events that were designated last year as National Special Security Events were: “the State of the Union Address; the U.S. – Africa Leaders Summit; and the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly.”
It now appears, however, that the Secret Service is going to be asked to view each of the Trump campaign rally events as “National Special Security Events” and provide its umbrella of protection to the entire event – thus subsidizing Trump’s political campaign.
Extrapolating from the GAO report and documents previously released, we estimate that federal protection services for Trump and his family cost the U.S. taxpayer in excess of $1 billion during his time in office.
