Judging Freedom - Trump Properties Charged Excessive Rates to Government

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, October 18th, 2022. It a couple of years trying to get its hands on records of the financial transactions between former President Trump and the federal government for the years when Trump was in the White House and finally succeeded in doing so, reported that, and many of you may know the first part of this, frequently when President Trump traveled to places around the world near where he owns or leases or has the naming right or the management right to hotels, he instructed the Secret Service to stay in his hotels so that the Trump organization could bill the Secret Service, the federal government, for the use of the hotel rooms. There's nothing really wrong with that, particularly

if it's a convenient and appropriate location. The problem is that the federal government rate at $280 a day was exceeded by four times that amount because the House Oversight Committee learned and revealed yesterday that the Trump Organization was billing the federal government $1,150 per room. So this is President Trump telling his own director of the CIA to pay a bill where when the bill is paid, it will go into a corporation that he controls. And many of these were not even when the Secret Service was protecting him. It's when the Secret Service was protecting his children. One of his children, Eric Trump, full disclosure, I've known him for many years, said whenever the federal government and in particular, whenever employees of the

federal government and particular Secret Service, I'm paraphrasing, stayed at a Trump-owned property, it was for free or at below market rate. Now that may technically be true because these properties at which the Secret Service stayed were not Trump-owned. They were Trump-named and Trump-managed, but not Trump-owned. So Eric, who can be a very sharp guy, may very well have given a statement that is literally true, but highly misleading. The point of the matter is this. Did the president of the United States cause the federal government to pay three or four times the normal rate for hotel rooms for Secret Service so that properties that he managed could receive the profit? The answer to that is yes, and it's profoundly unfair. Congress can't prosecute him. This might be a crime. It might be called theft by deception. It might be called theft of services. It might be unethical. It is

clearly unethical for the president to tell an entity in the executive branch that he runs that they must pay a bill that's many times what it should be. This is the same president who famously told Boeing, we're going to cut 10 or 15 million dollars off of every plane that you're selling to the federal government or every jet because my job is to save the federal government money. All right. I don't know where this is going to go. The Congress, thanks be to God, cannot prosecute anybody. They can only investigate, write legislation and expose. Are they going to send this to the DOJ with all the DOJ is doing? Are they even interested in this? I don't know the answer to either of those questions, but this is something you should know about. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.