Jared and Ivanka's Secret Service detail reportedly had to use Obama's bathroom because the couple wouldn't let the officers use theirs
- Secret Service agents assigned to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner aren't permitted to use any of the six bathrooms in the couple's Washington, DC, home in the wealthy neighborhood of Kalorama, according to The Washington Post.
- The agents were forced to use port-a-potties and even the restrooms in the homes of Vice President Mike Pence and former President Barack Obama.
- Since 2017, US taxpayers have shelled out roughly $100,000 — which amounts to about $3,000 a month — for the government to rent a nearby studio apartment so the Kushners' Secret Service detail can use its bathroom.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner didn't allow Secret Service agents assigned to their detail to use any of the six bathrooms in their 5,000-square-foot mansion in Washington, DC, so the agents resorted to using port-a-potties, store restrooms, and even the facilities in the homes of Vice President Mike Pence and former President Barack Obama, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Ivanka and Kushner, President Donald Trump's daughter and son-in-law who served as White House advisors, live in DC's affluent neighborhood of Kalorama in Northwest Washington, which also is home to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Obama, and other well-known names.
The Secret Service eventually came to a more permanent and comfortable solution for the agents - on the taxpayer's dime. The Post reported that taxpayers have spent a whopping $144,000 since September 2017 - around $3,000 a month - on a basement studio apartment near the Kushner residence with a bathroom for agents to use.
White House spokesman Judd Deere denied that the Kushners prohibited Secret Service agents from using the bathrooms in their home, stating, "It was only after a decision by the [Secret Service] was made that their detail sought other accommodations."
Multiple sources told the Post, however, that "the bathrooms inside the Trump/Kushner home were declared off-limits to the people protecting them from the beginning."
"It's the first time I ever heard of a Secret Service detail having to go to these extremes to find a bathroom," one law enforcement official told the Post.
The Post reported that agents occasionally went to a garage on the Obama's nearby Kalorama property that the Obamas' detail had set up as a "command post" for their own use. But that solution turned out to be short-lived after an agent on the Kushners' detail "left an unpleasant mess in the Obama bathroom at some point before the fall of 2017," resulting in the Kushner/Trump agents being barred from coming back.
At some times, they also drove about a mile away to a Secret Service command post at the Naval Observatory, where the Pences live, to use the bathrooms there. At others, they relied on the goodwill of the Kushners' neighbors and had to use porta-potties out on the street.
After some agents knocked on the door of the Kushners' neighbor Kay Kendall, chairwoman of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, to use her bathroom and shower, she had the idea to rent out the basement apartment in a rental property she owned across the street to the government for the agents.
"They sort of came in with the attitude, like, 'We are royalty,'" the Kushners' former neighbor Dianne Bruce told the Post. "When they put the porta-potty right outside on the sidewalk we weren't allowed to walk on, that was when people in the neighborhood said, 'That's really not acceptable.'"
The Kushners are looking to move on to their next chapter after the tumultuous Trump presidency. Recently, a moving truck was spotted outside of their Kalorama home, and the couple has reportedly spent $32 million on a waterfront property in Indian Creek Village in Miami, a private island dubbed the "Billionaire Bunker" with its own police force and marine patrol, who presumably have their own bathrooms to use.