Donald Trump gave his adult children 6 months of Secret Service protection after leaving office, at taxpayer expense, report says

• Donald Trump has granted his adult children and three officials six months of additional Secret Service protection.

• The additional security cost taxpayers $ 1.7 million, The Washington Post reported.

• This included payments to Trump’s own businesses, as agents stayed at Trump’s properties to protect his children.

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Donald Trump cost taxpayers $ 1.7 million by providing his adult children and three officials with Secret Service protection for six months after he left office, according to a Washington Post analysis of the new spending documents.

Before stepping down, Trump triggered a very unusual order, the newspaper said, providing additional protection for his four adult children, Donald Trump Jr., 43, Ivanka, 39, and Eric, 37, and Tiffany. , 27 years old.

Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner was also granted protection, as was Eric’s wife Lara.

Trump’s protective order also included three officials; former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien.

By law, the Secret Service protects former presidents and spouses, as well as their children up to the age of 16, for life.

In recent years, former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have extended it to include college-aged children for a short time after leaving office, the Washington Post reported.

However, Trump ordered the Secret Service to devote time and resources to protecting seven wealthy adults, according to the newspaper.

Over the past six months, the Secret Service spent about $ 347,000 on airline tickets, hotels and rental cars to protect Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, according to records viewed by the Washington Post.

It included vacations to Hawaii, Utah Ski County, a Wyoming ranch and South Carolina’s Kiawah Island, the newspaper said.

Secret Service agents also spent $ 9,000 on hotel rooms accompanying Kushner on a trip to the United Arab Emirates in May, citing federal spending data released online.

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According to The Daily Beast, Kushner chose to stay at the five-star Ritz Carlton in Abu Dhabi.

Data on the cost of flights were not provided.

The cost of protecting Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. was $ 241,000 and $ 213,000, respectively. The Washington Post said the brothers traveled primarily between New York City and South Florida, with occasional trips elsewhere.

Tiffany Trump was the cheapest to protect, with partial records showing the Secret Service spent $ 56,000 while protecting her, the newspaper reported.

Several of the payments were made to Trump’s own company. Officers were charged for the rooms they used while protecting her children, the newspaper reported.

Since leaving office, the former president has lived full-time at his properties and has also billed Secret Service for rooms, the newspaper said.

Jordan Libowitz, spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, told the Washington Post that the charges, while small, indicated a moral choice for the Trump family.

“The patriotic thing would obviously be not to charge the government to stay on your properties and not to profit or profit from the government,” Libowitz told the newspaper.

Of the three officials included in the protection order, Mnuchin was the most expensive to keep, costing the Secret Service $ 479,000.

This included accompanying Mnuchin on three trips to the Middle East and a stay in luxury hotels, the newspaper reported.

Mnuchin is a full-fledged multimillionaire, with an estimated fortune of $ 400 million, according to Forbes.

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