‘Attitude of royalty’: Trump’s family didn’t let agents use mansion bathroom; over $100,000 spent to rent one

The US government spent $3,000 a month - more than $100,000 to date - to rent a basement studio with a bathroom from a neighbour of US President Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner because the Kushner family did not allow Secret Service personnel assigned to them to use any of the half-dozen bathrooms inside the couple's 5,000-square-foot home house at Washington DC’s elite Kalorama neighborhood.

Instructed not to use the bathrooms, the Secret Service detail assigned to the family spent months searching for a reliable restroom to use on the job, according to neighbours and law enforcement officials, as per a report carried by The Washington Post.

The Secret Service agents were forced to rent the facility after resorting to a ‘porta-potty’, as well as bathrooms at the nearby home of former president Barack Obama and the ‘not-so-nearby’ residence of Vice President Mike Pence, says the report.

"It's the first time I ever heard of a Secret Service detail having to go to these extremes to find a bathroom," said one law enforcement official familiar with the situation, it said.

"They sort of came in with the attitude, like, 'We are royalty,'" a woman who until recently lived across the street, said of Kushner and Trump, the newspaper reported.

A White House spokesperson denied the allegation and asserted that it was the Secret Service's decision not to allow the protective detail inside.

That account is disputed by a law enforcement official familiar with the situation, who said the agents were kept out at the family's request, says the report.

General Services Administration records indicate that the lease of the 820-square-foot basement on Tracy Place NW began on Sept. 27, 2017 and was due to expire on Sept. 26 this year, at which point the federal government will have paid a total of $144,000 for the space, it said.

The Secret Service has repeatedly incurred serious costs from providing protection to President Trump's children. In October, The Washington Post reported that Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. had enriched their family's business, as the Trump Organization charged the federal government at least $238,000 for agents' lodgings when the trio and their families visited Trump properties.