In 2017, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spent several months living in a suite at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., with the Secret Service paying more than $33,000 to rent the adjoining room in order to screen his packages and visitors, three people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
Billing records show the Secret Service was charged $242 per night, which at the time was the maximum rate federal agencies were typically allowed to pay for a room. The room was rented for 137 nights, and the final bill, footed by taxpayers, was $33,154. Mnuchin stayed at the hotel while looking for a home to purchase in Washington. A Treasury Department spokesperson told the Post Mnuchin paid for his suite with his own money, and was able to negotiate a discounted rate.
When asked by the Post if Mnuchin considered how much it would cost taxpayers to have the Secret Service rent a hotel room for an extended period of time, the spokesperson said, "The secretary was not aware of what the U.S. Secret Service paid for the adjoining room."
Renting a room in order to guard a Treasury secretary is standard Secret Service practice, people familiar with the matter told the Post, but during other administrations, the president didn't own the hotel that was being paid. The Trump Organization has not revealed how much federal agencies have paid to the company since Trump's 2017 inauguration, but using public records, the Post has found more than 170 payments from the Secret Service to Trump properties, for a total of more than $620,000. Many of these payments stem from the Secret Service accompanying Trump on trips to his own hotels. Read more at The Washington Post. Catherine Garcia
A multiracial family looking to get away for the weekend were allegedly stalked, and subsequently trapped, by locals who mistook them for being bussed-in members of antifa, Washington state's Peninsula Daily News reports.
The family of four — a husband, wife, their 16-year-old daughter, and the husband's mother — were visiting Forks, Washington, from Spokane, Washington, and had driven the seven-and-a-half-hour distance in a full-sized school bus they planned to use to camp off a logging road near Olympic National Park. The family stopped at Forks Outfitters to get supplies, and were confronted by "seven or eight carloads of people in the grocery store parking lot" who "repeatedly asked them if they were antifa protesters," according to a press release by Sgt. Ed Anderson. "The family told the people they weren't associated with any such group and were just camping."
When the family left the parking lot, they were trailed by "at least four vehicles," the Peninsula Daily News reports. The family said that "two of the vehicles had people in them carrying what appeared to be semi-automatic rifles."
The family reached their camp site, but the sound of gunshots and power saws down the road made them decide to leave. As they were trying to drive away, they found that someone had sawed down trees in order to trap them in the site so that they couldn't get out.
Local high schoolers helped clear the roadway for the family and the Clallam County Sheriff's Office is reportedly investigating the incident. Heavy reports that posts had been made in local Facebook groups referencing the event, including boasts of "protect your town!" and "u think they realized they [came] to the wrong place yet?" You can read more at Peninsula Daily News, and learn more about the spread of false rumors about antifa agitators here at The Week. Jeva Lange
Friday morning's stunning job report is already being celebrated by the White House as unemployment unexpectedly fell to 13.3 percent in May. But even as forecasters have scrambled to understand how their predictions were so far off, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman stressed on Twitter that "whatever happened, these numbers should make you more, not less, pessimistic about the economic outlook."
Huh? As Krugman goes on to explain, the seemingly encouraging job report could actually "reinforce the White House inclination to do nothing and let emergency aid expire."
That's alarming to Krugman and other analysts because what May's job numbers do seem to prove is that the Payroll Protection Program, which encouraged small businesses to keep workers on payroll during the pandemic, was instrumental in helping bring back workers in May. "U.S. unemployment [is] at 13 percent [with] trillions in government aids," wrote The Washington Post's Jeffrey Stein. "What happens when huge infusion runs dry in July?"
But as of Thursday night, the Post was reporting that President Trump's recovery plan "largely amounts to optimism that as pandemic restrictions are loosened, the nation's economy will turn the lights back on by itself." As the Post goes on to explain, Trump is hesitant to offer states further aid, and opposes extending the soon-to-expire $600 unemployment bonus for laid-off workers.
White House economic adviser Stephen Moore seemed to confirm Krugman's fears. "There's no reason to have a major spending bill," he said in response to Friday's job numbers. "The sense of urgent crisis is very greatly dissipated by the report."
Not everyone shares the opinion that the job report lets the federal government off the hook. "The jobless rate, even if it declines, I believe is going to stay extremely high through the end of the year," former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen told the Post. "It's absolutely essential to have another package that will extend unemployment benefits beyond the summer. That's going to be tremendously needed." Jeva Lange