Are we paying the rent on the offices the FBI raided at Mar-a-Lago?

I’m well aware that I may be the only person in the world who cares about this, but I do, so you’re going to have to read about it now.

Five days after Trump technically stopped presidenting in January of 2021, it was announced that his Office of the Former President was being opened in Palm Beach County, FLA. That’s where Mar-a-Lago is located, of course, and I assumed the thieving SOB just opened this putative “office” in that tacky hellhole, in the sense that he signed some piece of paper designating some space in the complex the Office of the Former President.

I can find no information anywhere regarding where Trump’s Office of the Former President is literally located, other than it’s in Palm Beach County, so I’m going to assume the worst, which is an extremely safe bet with the Former Guy, as we’ve seen over and over again.

GSA documents reveal that in fiscal 2022, which ended six weeks ago, ends six weeks from now, the government (that’s us) paid Trump $160,000 to “compensate” him for the “rent” he was “paying” for his “Office of the Former President.” (Which again is probably a storage closet somewhere in Mar-a-Lago.)

This is just part of the $900,000 in taxpayer money that was spent on Trump last fiscal year, exclusive of Secret Service protection, which has a separate and confidential budget.

Those payments included:

$224K in a pension.

$150K in “personnel compensation” (This is the statutory maximum. I wonder who technically got this benny routed through them. Probably Kimberley Guifoyle or somebody like that).

$141K in benefits for said personnel.

$160K in office rent, or in this case “rent.”

$34K for utilities, communication, and miscellaneous

$5K for printing.

$159K for the always mysterious “other services.” The comparable number for “other services” for the other living ex-presidents were $62K for Obama, $40K for Bush, $92K for Clinton, and $122K for Carter.

$11K for supplies and $15K for equipment.

I know this is penny ante stuff in the context of the federal budget obviously, but we’re talking about a “billionaire” who once cashed a check for thirteen cents and steals everything that’s not nailed down and a lot of stuff that is, including knick knacks and folders full of nuclear secrets that can be sold to Saudi Arabia as part of the payback for bailing out Jared’s 666 Madison Avenue project (Speculative).

Anyway, the whole practice of shoveling a million-plus dollars per year to each ex-president, exclusive of security, is stupid, but in the case of Trump it’s especially gross, since unlike with his predecessors, there’s no actual Office of the Former President, apparently. It’s just more pure grifting by the biggest con man in the history of the USA, which considering that history is kind of like being the best right fielder in the history of the New York Yankees.

. . . OMIGOD I just realized what’s really going on here. Per the NYT he FBI removed 12 boxes of documents from “a basement storage area” at Mar-a-Lago, in part because DOJ and the National Archives feared that super sensitive classified materials were not only being retained illegaly by the the president, but were being stored in a highly insecure way.

What I just realized is that the reason they were being stored in this way is because this basement storage area IS the Office of the Former President. THAT’S the space that Trump is charging the government $160K per year to rent!

Trump’s a pimp. But not until this very day did I realize it was Harry Truman all along.

(Kidding/not kidding. I think this is what happened and it’s a key aspect of the whole story)