One of the constants of Donald Trump’s presidency has been the president and his family’s penchant for forcing American taxpayers to fund their lavish lifestyle, from weekend getaways at Mar-a-Lago to the Secret Service requesting jet skis to better facilitate the family’s love of water sports. Among the charges taxpayers are forced to cough up for are Donald Trump Jr.’s hunting trips, as the elder Trump son’s controversial big game expeditions require Secret Service protection. An August 2017 trip to Canada to hunt stone sheep cost the Secret Service $16,600, for instance—but it’s the First Son’s August 2019 trip to Mongolia that really required the federal government to pony up. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported Monday that taxpayers spent more than $76,000 on Secret Service protection for the eight-day trip, which is nearly $60,000 more than the government had initially disclosed.
According to documents obtained by CREW through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Secret Service spent a total of $76,859.36 on Trump Jr.’s Mongolian vacation, including the Trump son’s hunting trip and subsequent private meeting with Mongolian President Khaltmaagiin Battulga. (Which, to be fair, is still cheaper than other Trump family travels, like Don Jr. and Eric Trump’s $200,000 trip to the United Arab Emirates in 2017.) An official who works with Trump Jr. told CNN that outside of the Secret Service costs, all other costs associated with the trip were paid by the Trump son himself. The Secret Service had initially disclosed only $17,000 in costs to CREW in March, however, which excluded flight costs and the visit with Buttulga. “These Secret Service payments show how much taxpayer money directly funded Don Jr.’s trip, and show that the cost was much steeper than the agency originally admitted,” the CREW report notes.
The substantial taxpayer bill is the cherry on top of what was already a controversial trip for Trump Jr., who hunted Argali sheep in Mongolia after winning the trip at a charity auction for the National Rife Association in 2015. Argali sheep are the largest species of sheep and are considered to be threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and their hunting is prohibited in Mongolia without a permit. Luckily for Trump Jr., ProPublica reported in December, the Mongolian government granted the First Son one of the “coveted and rare permit[s]”—but only did so retroactively after he had already killed one of the rare sheep. “What are the chances the Mongolian government would’ve done any of that to someone who wasn’t the son of the United States’ president?” Kathleen Clark, a professor specializing in legal ethics at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, told ProPublica, suggesting that the Mongolian officials treated Trump Jr. favorably out of a “desire on the part of a foreign government to curry favor with the president’s family.” (As my colleague Bess Levin noted at the time, the reports of the Mongolian trip ironically came out around the same time as Don Jr. and Eric were publicly railing against nepotism in their attempts to attack Hunter Biden.)
Adding to the trip’s not-so-great appearance was the fact that Buttulga had visited with the president at the White House—and gifted Barron Trump a small-breed Mongolian horse named “Victory”—just weeks before Trump Jr. traveled to the country and met with Battulga privately, raising the specter that Mongolian officials were trying to do Trump a political favor with the permit. Trump Jr. was also apparently accompanied in Mongolia by Republican donor Kevin Small, who ProPublica found substantially increased his donations to the GOP in the months preceding the trip. In their report on the trip’s Secret Service expenses, CREW notes that the organization is still trying to find out even more details of Trump Jr.’s visit, including whether the State Department was involved and if the Interior Department granted the president’s son a permit to bring the carcass of the sheep he killed back to the U.S. “As a son of the president, Donald Trump Jr. is entitled to Secret Service protection and should be protected,” CREW notes, “but taxpayers deserve to know how much they are paying to facilitate his trophy hunting and interactions with major political donors and foreign leaders.”