But his country club!
by digby
Joe Conason tells a funny story about recently going to Mar-a-lago and having Trump do a double take realizing that an old New York nemesis was sitting on the patio:
It’s an amusing story, but it suggests how easily an unwanted guest can penetrate Trump’s beachside castle — known these days as the “Winter White House” — or, for that matter, his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, or anywhere the president spends time golfing and socializing when he isn’t watching Fox News or tweeting.
The latest unwelcome visitor to be discovered at Mar-a-Lago is a suspected Chinese spy, found to be carrying a thumb drive infected with malware and various other electronic items, along with a large amount of cash. Known as Yujing Zhang, she reportedly “talked her way” onto the premises and was only stopped and arrested thanks to an alert receptionist.
Although she went through two security checkpoints, nobody flagged the unusual devices in her bag. She remains in federal custody in South Florida while authorities try to figure out who she really is and what she was doing.
Trump later dismissed Zhang’s unsettling visit to the club as a “fluke,” but as the Secret Service later explained to reporters, it is club personnel who make security decisions there, not federal agents. The same absence of basic safeguards applies to the club members, their guests and the club employees. So clueless are the clubs about their personnel that dozens of undocumented workers have toiled at the Bedminster club for years.
(Manhattan’s Trump Tower, where he shows up far less often, resembles an armed bunker in Midtown. But the security risks there are baked in among the mobsters, gangsters and other unsavory characters own apartments there.)
At the actual White House, such a lax approach has never been tolerated, of course, nor has it at any other residence occupied by a president, from FDR’s Hyde Park to Dubya’s Texas ranch. Never before Trump has the nation seen national security compromised in such a feckless, arrogant and foolish way.
Why would this president take such crazy risks with American security and secrets? He is operating under the same depressingly familiar motive that drives so many of his decisions: He won’t allow any concern to diminish the profits of the Trump Organization. Indeed, he has raised fees at his clubs substantially as he cashes in on the presidency.
So while Trump continues to defy the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which he swore to uphold, at least Congress can enforce a measure of transparency on all these sordid transactions. In its pursuit of security clearance violations at the White House, the House Oversight Committee should demand full access to the membership and employee rosters of all Trump properties, with a focus on Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster. If the Trump Organization fails to turn over that information, the committee should issue subpoenas. The committee should also call the managers of those properties — as well as Secret Service officials — to explain in public testimony why no guest records are maintained.
I’m so old that I remember when the entire Republican party and political media were having a collective nervous breakdown over the idea that Hillary Clinton used a personal email and private server for non-classified work correspondence. There was never any evidence that the server had been hacked, unlike the government servers everyone else was using but the mere possibility had them in a full-blown meltdown.
Now we have the president’s profit-making country club open to pretty much anyone who can pay, apparently including possible spies. It’s just fine because Trump is doing such a good job.
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