The Mar-a-Lago search and Donald Trump’s abuse of the Former Presidents Act
By 
Last year I revealed that former president Harry Truman had convinced Congress to pass the Former Presidents Act – the law that provides millions of dollars of government benefits for ex-presidents – by lying about his financial situation after he left the White House. Truman claimed to be on the edge of financial distress, when in fact he was a very wealthy man, in part because he had misappropriated the equivalent of a couple of million dollars , in 2022 terms, from the White House expense account.
But Congress – and Truman’s subsequent biographers – bought what Truman was selling, and the FPA created all sorts of privileges for ex-presidents. One of these benefits is to have the government pay for the Office of the Former President, that is, the literal office space that former presidents set up after they have left the White House.
How much ex-presidents can charge the government in rent for these spaces is a product of negotiations between them and the General Services Administration, that oversees expenditures under the FPA. Currently former presidents Bush, Clinton, and Obama all maintain elaborate and extremely expensive office complexes in Dallas, New York City, and Chicago respectively. Each of these men charges the government more than half a million dollars per year for the rent on these spaces, that in all three cases take up more than 8,000 square feet of prime commercial real estate.
It should be very surprising, then, that in the fiscal 2022 federal budget, “only” $160,000 was appropriated to pay the rent on Donald Trump’s Office of the Former President – that is, less than a third of what the government is paying for the offices of his immediate predecessors.
What would cause the notoriously petty, envious, and avaricious Trump to agree to such an insultingly cheap arrangement, especially in comparison to the palatial office space paid for by the government for the benefit of his bete noire, Barack Obama?
The answer to that question has been revealed by the FBI’s search of Trump’s country club/personal residence Mar-a-Lago, pursuant to a federal judge agreeing to the Department of Justice’s request for a search warrant. The purpose of this search was to recover highly sensitive classified documents that, according to the DOJ, Trump wrongfully removed from the White House, and then had his lawyers lie about the fact that he had failed to return many of them.
The reason for this extraordinary intervention became clear in the days that followed. Apparently, the government obtained surveillance video and statements from informants which revealed that Trump was keeping these extremely sensitive documents in two absurdly unsecure locations: A storage room at the country club, and in the drawers of a desk in his personal office.
If the documents had been held with adequate precautions – say, in a properly managed and secured 8,000 square foot office complex in a high-rent business district – the government would no doubt have been willing to continue to fight in court to force Trump to return the documents. But because these extraordinarily confidential materials, some which may have contained various secrets about nuclear weapons, were being kept in a storage room and an office desk in a country club – that is, a location where countless members, guests, and staff circulate constantly with no pretense to being subjected to any security clearance – the DOJ and the FBI understandably concluded that emergency measures were necessary.
And here we encounter an astonishing fact, to the extent than anything about Donald Trump can ever be considered astonishing at this point. The reason these top secret materials were being kept in radically unsecure locations inside a country club is because those locations are Donald Trump’s Office of the Former President. In characteristic fashion, rather than rent and then have the government pay the entire rental cost of a real professional office complex, Trump negotiated a $160,000 per year rental agreement with the GSA, that would allow him to claim that this modest amount represented the fair market annual rental value of a storage room inside Mar-a-Lago, and Trump’s own office in the complex.
In other words, rather than taking even the most minimal security precautions with the super sensitive government documents he took with him, Trump simply set up a fake “Office of the Former President,” and pocketed the $160,000 that was supposed to be paying for a real office. This typical bit of grifting eventually triggered the security crisis that necessitated the government’s emergency raid.
This whole imbroglio, in which Trump abused the provisions of the FPA to collect rent on a non-existent office complex, merely provides a particularly excellent reason for jettisoning the entire statute. The FPA is a bad law, that was enacted under false pretenses, and has failed egregiously in regard to its original goal of making it unnecessary for former presidents to exploit their status for financial gain (All former presidents since its enactment 64 years ago have been completely undeterred from doing so).
That Trump so shamelessly exploited this law in ways that have triggered a profound political crisis just underlines why we should get rid of it altogether.