Prison Exec Pursues Federal Cash, Spends at Trump Hotel
By Nick Schwellenbach, Katherine Hawkins, Adam Zagorin
GEO became an avid fan of then-candidate Donald Trump after President Barack Obama’s Justice Department promised to stop approving new federal private prison contracts.
A senior executive of the GEO Group—the nation’s largest private prison and immigrant detention company—who lobbied the Trump administration for a multimillion-dollar cash infusion has also been staying in the luxurious Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., billing an unknown sum to his corporate expense account, according to previously unreported records unearthed by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), a non-profit watchdog.
The admission by David J. Venturella, GEO’s senior vice president of business development, came in a June 2019 deposition in an ongoing federal court case. The executive’s lobbying has drawn the scrutiny of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a frontrunner for the Democratic 2020 presidential ticket. It was aimed at winning federal reimbursement for the company’s hefty legal bills in lawsuits accusing it of human trafficking and forcing immigrant detainees to work with little or no compensation.
Venturella testified that he had charged Trump hotel bills to his GEO credit card on at least 10 occasions. But he has released no further details, leaving unclear how much he spent at the lavish facility only blocks away from the White House and Capitol Hill—the symbolic ground zero for this administration's alleged corruption—and how often Venturella or other company executives stayed in the hotel or other Trump properties on other occasions.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/private-prison-executive-at-geo-group-pursues-federal-funds-spends-at-trump-hotel?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
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