Trump’s Ballroom Story Blown Up by Jaw-Dropping Leak

Explosive leaked records peg President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom at $600 million—with taxpayers expected to cover more than half.

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The president, who turned 80 over the weekend, has vehemently insisted his teardown of the building’s historic East Wing would not cost voters a single cent. He also initially promised the venue would cost only $200 million, before publicly doubling to $400 million by last December.

None of that was true. An internal summary of the project, prepared for the White House by contractor Clark Construction and obtained by the Washington Post, put the full bill at $600 million on March 5—weeks before Trump made his Oval Office statement.

Just under $300 million was tagged as coming from “private sources,” the newspaper reported Tuesday. Taxpayers remain on the hook for the rest—with $155 million coming through the Secret Service, another $149 million through the White House Military Office, and $3 million through the Executive Residence.

The documents show just how drastically Trump has understated the cost since the project’s debut. The contractor’s initial forecast last July came in at $270 million. The president insisted at the time it would not top $200 million and stuck to that figure for months, then conceded in October it would cost, by which point the contractor’s internal estimate had already hit $478 million.

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Federal officials had already cleared more than a dozen payouts to Clark Construction, worth tens of millions in public money, before Trump’s March denial, WaPo reports. Specialists have particularly questioned why the Secret Service appears to have been tapped for demolition costs, which they described as a real “stretch” of the agency’s protective mission.

Congress has declined to pitch in. In early June, seven Republicans sided with Democrats to block public funding for the ballroom. GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who opposed the spending, said Trump’s pledge to donors should hold. “I think that’s the commitment that should be kept,” she said.

A judge paused above-ground work in March after a preservation group sued, while allowing an underground dig to continue as part of efforts to build a secure bunker beneath the structure. The administration later branded the rebuild a security priority, following an apparent attempt on the president’s life by a gunman at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April.