Former Republican Governor of Maine Paul LePage and his staff spent at least $22,000 for more than 40 rooms over a two-year period during their visits to the Washington, D.C.’s Trump International Hotel, according to a report by Portland Press Herald.
Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram obtained documents which revealed that LePage and his administration paid between $362 to over $1,100 a night for rooms at the Trump International hotel during their visits to D.C. to meet President Donald Trump, Congress members or to attend events at the White House.
Receipts also indicate that hundreds of dollars were paid by the governor or his administration to buy expensive menu items from the Trump Hotel’s restaurant. Attorneys are likely to scrutinize the spending at the D.C. hotel in a federal lawsuit.
Maine Gov. Paul LePage ran up a $22,000 bill staying at the Trump hotel in Washington, DC https://t.co/VnH06IvSnW pic.twitter.com/pfY2WH66AG
— ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) February 19, 2019
More than 2,000 pages of documents including emails and receipts of Trump hotel were obtained or reviewed by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram under the under Freedom of Access Act (FOAA), requesting for travel expenses made by LePage, his staff and security team in 2017 and 2018.
On his part, LePage denied having any knowledge of paying $1,100 a night at the Trump International Hotel during his business trips to Washington, D.C., adding that he would have questioned the high spending if it had come to his notice.
“If we paid $1,100 for a hotel room in one night, shame on me, because I wasn’t aware of it. And shame on me, because I should have been on top of that,” LePage told Matthew Gagnon and Ken Altshuler of WGAN radio in an interview on Monday.
The office of the former governor has not provided any detailed travel information while he was in office.
Earlier, in late 2017, the attorneys general of Maryland and Washington, D.C. had cited LePage stays in Trump Hotel in a federal lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of Trump’s financial interest in the business.