Trump's Secret Service grift was bad, but how bad was it?

Fresno CA

Description

Throughout his White House tenure, President Donald Trump and his family repeatedly directed taxpayer funds toward his hospitality business. But until now, we didn’t know just how bad it really was. By repeatedly charging the Secret Service as much as five times the allowable government rate to protect his family at Trump properties, Trump twisted the Secret Service’s protective mission into a personal cash cow — all while apparently lying about it to taxpayers. Back in May, my organization, CREW, got documents that showed the Secret Service had paid nearly $2 million to the business Trump refused to divest from when he became president. Even worse, we saw evidence that, again and again, when Trump’s family went to Washington, D.C., they had the Secret Service protect them at Trump International Hotel. But we’ve never seen a commander-in-chief and his family repeatedly use the Secret Service to line their pockets in this way. There’s no reason the Trump family needed to stay at Trump properties. The stays became such a moneymaker for the Trump family that the Secret Service had to request a larger budget to cover all of its trips to Trump properties. (Once a crook, always a crook.)