To be fair, Paul LePage is the racist cretin who said this …
"These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty. These types of guys, they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave."
… so how bad can his decision to waste Maine taxpayers’ money by pouring it into Donald Trump’s insatiable greed-hole really be?
Well … bad.
From the Portland Press Herald:
Former Gov. Paul LePage and his staff members paid for more than 40 rooms at Washington, D.C.’s Trump International Hotel during a two-year period, spending at least $22,000 in Maine taxpayer money at a business owned by the president’s family.
Documents recently obtained by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram show that the LePage administration paid anywhere from $362 to more than $1,100 a night for rooms at the luxury hotel during trips to meet with President Trump or his inner circle, attend White House events or talk to members of Congress. Receipts from those dozen trips also show the Republican governor or his administration spending hundreds of dollars on filet mignon or other expensive menu items at the restaurant in the Trump hotel. Those expenditures are likely to draw additional scrutiny from attorneys who have cited LePage’s previously disclosed stays at the D.C. hotel in a federal lawsuit alleging the president is improperly profiting from the business.
Oh, yeah, that’s the other part of this scandal. Trump is directly profiting from the torrent of boot-lickers who pour into Washington to lick, well, far more than just his boots.
But that’s just business as usual. And, after all, LePage’s D.C. sojourns are simply another footnote in the pages-long litany of DJT’s vertiginous corruption.
Then again, this sort of thing isn’t business as usual for Maine:
The spending levels at the Trump hotel were so high that they were flagged by a worker in the state controller’s office, who sought guidance on state regulations for reimbursing such expenditures.
“The reason I am asking is because the Governor and some of his staff are staying in Washington, D.C. pretty frequently at the Trump International Hotel and the room cost is WAY more than the allowed amount,” the worker wrote to Deputy Controller Shirley Browne in June 2017, following a particularly costly month.
So, yeah, if you live in Maine, I reckon you might have something to say about this.
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