In the middle of Pennsylvania Ave.
by Tom Sullivan
C-17 takes off from Prestwick Airport near Glasgow, Saturday August 31, 2019. Image from video by Jim Ramsay via YouTube.
The grifter-in-chief has gotten away with everything else so far, so why not robbing taxpayers in the middle of Pennsylvania Ave.?
In early Spring of this year, an Air National Guard crew made a routine trip from the U.S. to Kuwait to deliver supplies.
What wasn’t routine was where the crew stopped along the way: President Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort, about 50 miles outside Glasgow, Scotland.
Politico reports the C-17 transport stopped each way to refuel at Prestwick Airport, the closest airport to Trump Turnberry, rather than at U.S. military bases in Germany, in Spain, or in the Azores, as it had on dozens of other trips. One crew member told a friend Turnberry was so posh he could not afford food or drink on an airman’s per diem.
But a YouTube search of plane-spotter videos from Prestwick shows there is more USAF activity there than the pair of C-17 landings Politico cites. Some go back eight years. How many recent landings there also resulted in Turnberry stays for aircrews and direct payments to the Trump Organization is less clear.
A June letter sent to Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan by Congressmen Elijah Cummings and Jamie Raskin on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform seeks documents explaining the associated expenditures. The committee has been looking into the matter since April and has yet to receive a response.
The stopovers suggest Defense Department spending for civilian-priced fuel is helping prop up “debt-ridden” Prestwick Airport’s business 32 miles south of Glasgow. Prestwick sought contracts to service frontline U.S. military flights “both while Trump was the Republican presidential candidate and since he became president,” according to February 2018 Guardian report:
The documents seen by the Guardian show Prestwick struck deals with Trump Turnberry to supply cut-price rooms for select passengers and crew. According to the Sunday Post newspaper, Prestwick also offered free rounds of golf at Turnberry to visiting US military and civilian air crews. Prestwick said it had special arrangements with other hotels in Ayrshire.
The Pentagon spending on fuel at Prestwick since October 2017 has raised eyebrows in Congress (Politico again):
Taken together, the incidents raise the possibility that the military has helped keep Trump’s Turnberry resort afloat — the property lost $4.5 million in 2017, but revenue went up $3 million in 2018.
“The Defense Department has not produced a single document in this investigation,” said a senior Democratic aide on the oversight panel. “The committee will be forced to consider alternative steps if the Pentagon does not begin complying voluntarily in the coming days.”
A Pentagon spokesperson told The Guardian last year, “The selection and use of any airfield by the Department of Defense is guided strictly by that airfield’s ability to support combined (US, UK, and Nato) air operations in support of our shared security objectives.”
That may be, but the Politico report comes in the same week the White House is taking heat for Vice President Mike Pence housing his entourage at Trump’s Doonbeg, Ireland property during a trip to Dublin. (Doonbeg is on the west coat, hundreds of miles from Dublin.) That incident, plus Trump promoting his Doral golf resort in Florida as a possible location for next year’s G7 meeting, suggests the shameless self-promoter continues to enrich himself at taxpayer expense and flout laws prohibiting self-dealing while in government service. Criminal or incompetent, neither is a good look on a U.S. president.
Did we mention Trump appears to be blackmailing Ukraine?