By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 24, 2024 ~
Eleven days after an assassination attempt was made on a presidential candidate’s life at a mass gathering in Pennsylvania, the U.S. Secret Service will face added strains and risks by the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, allowing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to come to Washington, D.C. and address a joint session of Congress today. (Numerous seats at the session will be empty as a number of progressives have indicated that they will boycott the event over Netanyahu’s conduct of Israel’s war in Gaza which has resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe.)
Netanyahu arrived in D.C. on Monday. One day later, protests were occurring outside his hotel and a building that houses Congressional offices, according to the Associated Press. A mass protest attracting thousands is expected during his speech to the joint session of Congress today.
In addition to protecting the sitting President, Vice President and former Presidents and their spouses for their lifetimes, the Secret Service is also tasked with protecting foreign dignitaries. Thus, at a time of fraught political tensions, Netanyahu is simply adding to the stretched resources of the Secret Service.
Former President Donald Trump announced on his social media platform that he plans to meet with Netanyahu this Friday – not in the northeast where Trump has been residing since May – but at his luxury resort and winter residence, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.
The fact that nobody voluntarily comes from the Northeast to hot, humid South Florida in July and August, raises questions about the decision to meet at Mar-a-Lago.
As we reported on Monday, using figures from an audit by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), U.S. taxpayers picked up a tab of approximately $495 million to transport and provide protective services to Donald Trump in his 145 trips to Mar-a-Lago while he was President (representing just a small portion of the thousands of trips that he and his adult children took where Secret Service protective services were being provided during his presidency.)
According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), in just the two fiscal years of 2018 and 2019, “the Trump family has taken 3,249 protected trips. In seven years, the Obama family took a total of 933.”
The tab for protection at Mar-a-Lago is particularly high because the resort is on the water and requires resources from the U.S. Coast Guard to protect the area. The GAO reported that the Coast Guard spent $3.4 million protecting Trump during just four trips to Mar-a-Lago that occurred in a four-week span in February and March of 2017. Because both Netanyahu and Trump will require their own protective detail from the Secret Service, plus assets from the U.S. Coast Guard, plus the likelihood of military aircraft for Netanyahu, plus rental of a Secret Service command center at Mar-a-Lago, we approximate that the costs of this trip to the taxpayer will be well over $5 million, using the prior breakdown of costs from the GAO.
The Secret Service’s tab at Trump properties kept going cha-ching after Trump left office. On October 17, 2022, the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on Oversight released a spreadsheet showing what Donald Trump’s properties had billed the Secret Service during his presidency and for the first eight months of 2021 when he was no longer in office. (We’ve attached that document here.)
Notice in the document linked directly above that it’s not in order by dates – making a quick assessment of spending by month or year impossible. One thing that does jump out is that on July 31, 2017 there is an item listed as “CNOS: Golf Cart Rental” which the U.S. taxpayer picked up for $3,464 at the Trump International Golf Club. (CNOS stands for Candidate Nominee Operation Section. Of course, by this time, Trump was already President.)
It makes sense that Secret Service agents would have to follow a President, who spends so much of his time golfing, around the links on a golf cart in order to safely protect him. What doesn’t make sense is why this is the only time the words “golf cart” appear on this spreadsheet. The GAO report noted that certain “classified” expenses are not released by federal agencies. We suspect, but can’t say for certain, that these outlandish golf cart expenses may have been earmarked as “Trans” for transportation on subsequent invoices.
Take, for example, what Trump properties billed the Secret Service in just the month of May 2021 – after President Trump had been out of office for four months. See above graph. (We had to dig through the spreadsheet and cut and paste these May 2021 expenses together because they were out of order and spread throughout the document released to the House Committee on Oversight.) “Hotel Trans” comes out to $40,011.15 out of a total cost of $50,210.67 for the month of May 2021. (What kind of resort charges round off to $9,000, $9,500 and $10,000? The lump sum of $10,000 appears 13 times on the spreadsheet.)
Making this graph of expenses for May 2021 all the more suspect, is that CBS News reported that Trump moved from Mar-a-Lago to his summer residence in Bedminster, New Jersey on May 9, 2021. How could the Secret Service run up $50,000 in Mar-a-Lago expenses over the span of nine days?
We admire and respect the courage and talents and exemplary history of the U.S. Secret Service, its agents and staff. Donald Trump and his minions – not so much.
