The U.S. Secret Service paid more than $10,000 to rent guest rooms at Donald Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club earlier this summer while providing protection for the former president, according to The Washington Post, which cited newly released spending records.
The cost of the accommodations — paid in May with taxpayer dollars — was revealed by the agency through a public records request.
The tab is presumably still rising after the former president moved to Bedminster for the summer on May 9, although there is no record yet showing what the agency has paid for rent at the resort in June and thus far in July.
Trump’s businesses have collected more than $50,000 in taxpayer money for rooms used by Secret Service agents since he left office in January through early May, according to The Washington Post.
During that time, the Secret Service spent more than $40,000 for agents to rent a room at Trump’s lavish Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.
At Bedminster, a similar arrangement continues, records show.
Trump arrived there on May 9, and by the end of the month the agency received a bill totaling $10,199.52, the Post reported.
Although records didn’t reveal the nightly rate, the cost amounted to $566.64 per night, which the Secret Service was charged for a four-bedroom “cottage” at the resort while Trump was still in office.
If the agency paid that same rate in May, then $10,200 was good for only 18 nights at Bedminster.
The receipt from May is thus far the only record of payment that the Secret Service has released from Trump’s time at Bedminster this year, the Post reported. Another bill shows the agency spent an additional $3,400 at the golf club several months before Trump arrived, but it’s unclear what those charges were for.
Another document revealed that agents planned to continue to rent rooms at the club from May 28 to July 1.
There is no law that prevents Trump from charging the Secret Service rent at his properties even though he is no longer president.
At the same time, the Secret Service is free to pay whatever it must to rent rooms near its protectees for use as command posts and meeting rooms, the Post reported.
“The service is more focused on the protective necessity, as opposed to, ‘How much is it going to cost after the fact?’ There’s nothing they can do” if rates are high, said Jonathan Wackrow, a longtime Secret Service agent who now works for the consulting firm Teneo. “It’s a question of not, ‘Can they do it?’ but ‘Should they be charging that much?’ "
Joe Biden also charged the Secret Service $2,200 per month to use a cottage on his property in Delaware during his time as vice president, but since he became president in January, he has not charged rent to the agency, the Post reported.
In all, Trump’s company collected more than $2.5 million in rent from government agencies during his presidency, according to a Post analysis of federal spending records.
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