Trump gets raked over the coals for his weekend Twitter-Tantrum about the Mueller investigation.
Trump took social media again this weekend, tossing another Twitter-Tantrum.
He started the weekend tweeting: “A.P. has just reported that the Russian Hoax Investigation has now cost our government over $17 million, and going up fast. No Collusion, except by the Democrats!”
Continuing his tantrum he next quoted Fox & Friends talking head, Dan Bongino, tweeting on Saturday: “John Brennan, no single figure in American history has done more to discredit the intelligence community than this liar. Not only is he a liar, he’s a liar about being a liar. $17 million spent, it’s a scam Investigation. Americans are being worked. We now know there was Russian collusion, with Russians and the Democrats. The Mueller team is stacked with anti-Trumpers, who actually represented Clinton people (& gave $’s to Crooked H). ~Dan Bongino“
He rounded out the day, tweeting: “There was No Collusion with Russia (except by the Democrats). When will this very expensive Witch Hunt Hoax ever end? So bad for our Country. Is the Special Counsel/Justice Department leaking my lawyers letters to the Fake News Media? Should be looking at Dems corruption instead?“
He was back at it again on Sunday whimpering about Hillary Clinton, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Paul Manafort [no need to bore you with the details…].
However, as The Hill reported, Trump has spent considerably more money on his trips to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida than has been spent on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
[Trump] has repeatedly attacked the Mueller probe for racking up millions of dollars in expenditures, doing so most recently this week after the Justice Department reported that the special counsel’s office had spent roughly $16.7 million on expenses in just over a year of investigation.
[…]
But that number is dwarfed by the amount required to pay for the president’s numerous trips to the “Winter White House,” which Washington Post and Politico analyses have estimated to cost taxpayers on average between $1 million and $3 million per trip.
As of Dec. 26, Trump had spent 39 days at Mar-a-Lago in 2017. Trump took his 17th trip to the property in April, according to Town and Country magazine.
The New York Times fact-checked Trump’s tweet about the expense of the Mueller investigation so far, noting that Trump couldn’t even tell the truth when he cited the AP (Associated Press).
The AP did not report the cost is going up fast. It cited a Justice Department finding that the investigation over 10 months has cost $16.7 million, which Trump rounded up to $17 million. Of the costs assigned to the investigation, $9 million would have been spent even absent the investigation, the department said.
The Washington Post took a look at the bigger picture, reporting that:
In the grand scheme of government spending, $16.7 million is … not a lot. The federal government is expected to spend about $4.1 trillion in fiscal 2018. To put it into more tangible terms, spending $16.7 million of $4.1 trillion is like making $50,000 a year and spending 20 cents.
Driving the earlier point home about his Mar-a-Lago expenditures – at taxpayer expense of course – The Washington Post reported:
The conservative group Judicial Watch, which calculated similar figures for Obama’s presidency, told the AP that it figured each trip to Mar-a-Lago cost about $1 million, including only Air Force One travel and Secret Service protection.
Guess what. Trump has been to Mar-a-Lago 17 times, for a grand total of $17 million in flight and protection costs.
Continuing, The Washington Post elaborated on those figures with the help of Judicial Watch:
This is including only two subsets of the costs incurred by the federal government. It doesn’t include… things like “airlifting equipment such as the presidential limousines.” Nor does it include all the costs of protection. In July of last year, The Washington Post determined that the Coast Guard had spent about $6.6 million on guarding the beachfront-adjacent property over the course of Trump’s first five visits there. If the other visits were similarly expensive, the overall price tag essentially doubles.
Just to go to Mar-a-Lago, Judicial Watch figures that each trip Trump has made to his club in Bedminster, N.J., costs more than $40,000 in travel time alone. He’s been there nine times. He’s been to his golf club in Sterling, Va., a whopping 31 times, usually on the weekends; the costs of those trips are not included in the total.
These are all estimates. To get hard figures, we’d need more information from the White House, something that the Government Accountability Office announced last March that it was hoping to determine (as it did for Obama). Just this week, though, it was reported that the White House was stonewalling.
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