President Trump’s company charges the Secret Service for the rooms agents use while protecting Trump at his properties. The charges have been as high as $650 per night for a room at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., or $17,000 a month for a cottage at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey.
Who pays these bills? U.S. taxpayers. That means Trump has a business arrangement with his own government, which has brought the Trump Organization at least $1.2 million in revenue. But the details of that relationship remain largely hidden.
The Secret Service has released hundreds of documents showing payments to Trump properties, in response to public-records requests and a lawsuit filed by The Washington Post. But these documents are often cryptic, with key details redacted. And other federal agencies, including the State and Defense departments, have released far fewer records.
This is how The Post sought to unravel the mysteries in these documents, and to report the true extent of what Trump’s company has charged taxpayers.
Since Trump took office in January 2017, he has visited his own properties on 355 days. Secret Service agents come with him. And Trump’s company charges them. Last November, in response to a public-records request from the group Property of the People, the Secret Service released a list of 56 payments it had made to Trump’s companies. All were from 2017. But the list was cryptic. It didn’t say what the Secret Service had been charged for. In some cases, it didn’t even say which Trump property had been paid.
The Post tried to decode this list. One surprise: At least 20 of the payments to "Trump National Golf Club" — worth $63,700 — weren’t to a golf club at all. Other documents, already released, showed that they were payments to Mar-a-Lago. The Post learned that many of them were hotel bills for $650 per night — a rate far higher than the usual limits on federal hotel spending. There is no legal limit on what the Secret Service may spend on hotel rooms while its agents are protecting the president.
In four other cases, the dollar amount was a giveaway to the location: All included a tax of 6.875 percent, which was the sales tax in New Jersey in 2017. That pointed to Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, which is the only Trump property in New Jersey that Trump has visited as president.
But many of the payments on this list remain mysterious. If you have information about these charges — or any other instances where taxpayer money was used to pay the president’s company — contact Post reporter David Fahrenthold at fahrenthold@washpost.com.
Documents
These receipts have been redacted by the Secret Service, and they contain notations giving the reason for the redactions. The most common notation is "(b)(7)(e)," which refers to a section of the U.S. code that allows the government to redact information about the "techniques and procedures" of law enforcement agencies.
July 31, 2017 | Bedminster, N.J.
A receipt from the files of the Secret Service showing the rental of a cottage at Trump’s Bedminster golf club for July. The rate is $17,000 for the month, plus New Jersey’s 6.875 percent sales tax. Trump spent seven days at the club that month, but the Secret Service still paid for days he wasn’t there. The handwriting in this document is original, written by a Secret Service official. The Trump Organization said this rate is less than what it could get on the open market, given that the the cottage has three bedrooms.
Sept. 4, 2017 | Bedminster, N.J.
A receipt from the files of the Secret Service showing the rental of a cottage at Trump’s Bedminster golf club for August, plus four days in September. The rate is $17,000 per month, plus New Jersey’s 6.875 percent sales tax. Trump spent 16 days there that month. The handwriting in this document is original, written by a Secret Service official. The Trump Organization says this rate is below what it could get from regular customers, given that the the cottage has three bedrooms.
Oct. 1, 2017 | Bedminster, N.J.
A receipt from the files of the Secret Service showing the rental of a cottage at Trump’s Bedminster golf club for September, minus four days that had been paid for in a previous bill. The rate is $17,000 per month, plus New Jersey’s 6.875 percent sales tax. Trump spent 10 days at the club that month, but the Secret Service still paid for days he wasn’t there. The handwriting in this document is original, written by a Secret Service official. The Trump Organization said this rate is less than what it could get from regular customers, given that the cottage has three bedrooms.
February 2017 | Palm Beach, Fla.
Receipts released by the Secret Service showing charges paid to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in February — his first trip there as president. Three of the receipts are in increments of $650, the amount that Trump’s company charged the Secret Service for each night in a Mar-a-Lago guest room. The other receipt is for $3,510; it is unclear what this charge is for. The Trump Organization has said that the current rate being charged for these rooms is "substantially lower," but did not say what it was.
February 2018 | Palm Beach, Fla.
Receipts released by the Secret Service to the group Public Citizen, showing charges paid to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in February 2018. The receipts show Trump’s club charged $396.15 per night for guest rooms, less than the year before. The receipts show this rate was described as "at cost." It is far higher than the figure Eric Trump previously gave as the cost the Trump Organization charges the U.S. government: He said in 2019 that the figure was "like 50 bucks."
September 2016 to January 2018 | Washington, D.C.
This document, released by the Department of Homeland Security, shows expenditures by the Secret Service’s Washington Field Office (WFO) and Dignitary Protection Division (DPD) at Trump’s hotel in the city. The document does not give reasons for these expenditures. Some of them occurred on days when Trump visited the hotel, but most did not.
January to June 2017 | Various
This document, released by the Secret Service after a public-records request from the group Property of the People, contains listings of Secret Service credit card purchases at Trump properties. The documents give a sense of the scale of this spending: more than $250,000 in just Trump’s first five months in office. But it provides little clarity about why the money was spent and what rates were charged. This document was the spark for The Post’s reporting on this topic — showing how little was known about this business relationship between Trump and his own government.
March 2019 | Palm Beach, Fla.
This receipt, obtained by Public Citizen, shows that the Secret Service paid $24,615 for rooms at Mar-a-Lago during a 12-day span in spring 2019. If the club was still charging the rate of $396.15 per night, that would mean the Secret Service rented 61 rooms during that time.
Winter 2017 | Palm Beach, Fla.
This $22,580 bill from Mar-a-Lago shows the Secret Service paid for 57 room-nights over 18 days in December 2017. Although the check-in and check-out dates are redacted on this document, the Secret Service later said that the check-in date was Dec. 10, and the check-out date was Dec. 28. This bill was obtained by Public Citizen.
June-July 2018 | Bedminster, N.J.
These receipts, obtained by Public Citizen, show the Secret Service continued to rent the "Sarazen Cottage" at Trump’s property in Bedminster, N.J., through the summer of 2018. The rental rate was $17,000 per month, and the receipts show that Trump’s club was paid even on days when he was not there — or even in the United States. In June 2017, his course billed the government even during his summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore.
May 16-May 18, 2019 | Scotland
Trump's son Eric and his family have brought the Trump Organization far more taxpayer money than any of Trump's three other adult children, according to Secret Service records. One major reason: Eric Trump regularly leads members of the company's U.S. golf courses on transatlantic tours of Trump's courses in Scotland and Ireland. His company charges Secret Service agents to follow. In this case, Eric Trump took a group of members from Trump's Charlotte club to Scotland, and his company charged the Secret Service for rooms at two Trump courses. The Post obtained this document after it filed a public-records lawsuit.
April 2-May 25, 2020 | Bedminster, N.J.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump posted an Instagram video on March 29 urging Americans to "please, please" stay home to avoid spreading coronavirus. After that, she and her husband, Jared Kushner, made 11 trips to the Trump Organization's golf club in Bedminster, N.J., all while New Jersey and their home city of Washington, D.C., were under stay-at-home orders. The Trump club charged the Secret Service for the rooms that agents used while protecting them -- even though the club itself was closed for weeks during this period.
