White House Aides Racked Up $1,000 Bar Bill At Trump’s Mar-A-Lago Resort, Used Taxpayer Money To Pay For It

White House aides racked up quite the bar bill during two days spent at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort while the president met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, but it was the American people who ended up picking up the bill.

A report from the watchdog group Property of the People, published by ProPublica, found that Trump aides racked up $1,076 in top-shelf drinks at the luxury resort during the April of 2017 meetings. After the summit between Trump and Jinping ended, White House aides headed to the bar, where they reportedly told the bartender to leave so they could talk in private — and so they could pour their own drinks.

The Mar-a-Lago catering director described the events in an email — one made available via DocumentCloud — to the State Department a few weeks later. The catering director said that Secret Service did not allow the bartender to return, and that they had to later calculate a bill for just how much alcohol was consumed. In sum, the group had 54 drinks totaling $838, which with a 20 percent service charge came to $1,076, a report from Business Insider noted. The White House aides left without paying the bill, the report added.

As the report added, aides helped themselves to some of the most expensive drinks.

“The drinkers enjoyed $352 of Chopin vodka, $240 of Patron and $150 of Don Julio Blanco tequila, and $96 of Woodford Reserve bourbon, the receipt [via DocumentCloud] shows.”

This is not the first time that taxpayer spending at Mar-a-Lago has come under scrutiny. As The Inquisitr previously reported, the U.S. Secret Service sent the American taxpayers a $54,000 bill for tents that were used at the swanky resort’s New Year’s Eve party — one that Donald Trump did not even attend because he was holed up in Washington during the partial government shutdown.

The New Year’s Eve party at Trump’s exclusive resort also came under fire during his first year in office, when taxpayers footed the bill of more than $26,000 for renting lights, generators, tables, and tents at the bash. Trump has been making quite a bit of money off the resort since taking office, the Press Herald reported. Ticket prices for the party jumped by 25 percent since he became president, reaching $1,000 for non-members and $650 for members. That comes on top of the club’s $200,000 initiation fee — a fee which was doubled the year Trump became president.

Report: Taxpayers picked up a $1,000 bar tab at Mar-a-Lago https://t.co/ilvap1cQ7P

— MSN (@MSN) May 1, 2019

As the Business Insider report noted, the Library Bar at Mar-a-Lago — where the bill was racked up — is home to a portrait of a young and athletic-looking Donald Trump wearing tennis shorts.