My maintenance squadron went to Scotland, and all I got was this lousy invoice

The future Prestwick Spaceport, via South Ayrshire Council.

The important part of this remarkable Politico article by Natasha Bertrand and Bryan Bender, no doubt, is that it looks as if the US armed forces have been used to funnel money into the Trump Organization's coffers, but I want to start someplace a little different.

10) Oh and as always - there's a tweet. pic.twitter.com/3uoZcRjtod

— David Frum (@davidfrum) September 7, 2019

So Prestwick Airport is the one that serves Glasgow, in western Scotland, and also Trump Turnberry, the Luxury Collection Resort on the Firth of Clyde that the Trump Organization acquired in 2014, so the way Trump expected to make the airport successful would be presumably by bringing it a lot of golfer traffic. Which would be nice for the Scottish government, maybe, because they own it, since 2013, and it's a money loser.

He did not mean, I imagine, that the Pentagon would be spending $11 million on fuel there between October 2017 and June 2019 but that's a thing that happened, according to Bertrand and Bender, though they could have bought it a lot cheaper 360 miles away at Lakenheath, Suffolk, home to the 48th Fighter Wing of the United States Air Forces Europe–Air Forces Africa, or better still Mildenhall, also in Suffolk, home of the 100th Air Refueling Wing, if they were in the neighborhood. And they were apparently in the neighborhood pretty often: 629 separate purchase orders, says a letter from Elijah Cummings and Jamie Raskin of the House Oversight Committee to acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan (dated 21 June, just three days, as it happened, before Shanahan quit the post to spend more time with his problematic family).

And, says a new report from The Times today, a lot more than Cummings knew about three months ago:

The records also show that the first payments under this contract started in early October 2017 and that a total of 917 payments for “liquid petroleum” have since been made at a total cost of $17.2 million. It is unclear how many stopovers this represents, as multiple payments were often made on the same day.

We don't know why they bought all that fuel at Prestwick instead of a US base, which would be the normal practice, but it's not necessarily anything directly to do with the Turnberry; the airport seems to be in the process of becoming something like a US base in its own right, and this goes back to before the Trump presidency, though not the Trump candidacy, according to reporting from The Guardian in February 2018:

a visit by US diplomats to Prestwick to prepare for Trump’s arrival to open the Turnberry resort in June 2016 led to new contacts with the USAF’s European chief of defense and the US air attache to the UK. In October 2016, Prestwick signed a three-year basing and fuel supply deal with the Defense Logistics Agency, helping it almost double its income from fuel sales to £3m last year.

[Scottish economy secretary Keith] Brown was told those contacts also led to the USAF earmarking Prestwick to take a greater share of its flights after it leaves Mildenhall airbase in Suffolk, its largest base in the UK, in 2024.

(Brown "was told" because the airport is managed independently of the Scottish government, I should add, and there's quite a good chance that the ministers really don't know much or all of the stuff they claim not to know.)

But as we've seen, no payments were made on that 2016 contract until well after Trump's inauguration, it's ended up being much more than £3 million, and the relationship has gotten funkier in other ways, as Turnberry and Trump get more directly involved in Prestwick's marketing of itself:

The Turnberry resort has been given a central role in Prestwick’s attempts to promote Ayrshire as a tourist destination and to win substantial investment by US space industry firms working for Nasa.

The documents seen by the Guardian show Prestwick struck deals with Trump Turnberry to supply cut-price rooms for select passengers and crew. According to the Sunday Post newspaper, Prestwick also offered free rounds of golf at Turnberry to visiting US military and civilian air crews. Prestwick said it had special arrangements with other hotels in Ayrshire. 

It's possible that the airport is marketing itself as a base in Trump's Space Force, for one thing (Prestwick's bid to become a spaceport goes back to 2014).

And then there's the new big story in Bertrand's and Bender's report of the C-17 transport from the 176th maintenance squadron based in Elmendorf, Alaska delivering supplies to Kuwait last spring, which stopped at Prestwick and put the crew up at Turnberry in both directions;

One crew member was so struck by the choice of hotel — markedly different than the Marriotts and Hiltons the 176th maintenance squadron is used to — that he texted someone close to him and told him about the stay, sending a photo and noting that the crew’s per diem allowance wasn’t enough to cover food and drinks at the ritzy resort....

On previous trips to the Middle East, the C-17 had landed at U.S. air bases such as Ramstein Air Base in Germany or Naval Station Rota in Spain to refuel, according to one person familiar with the trips. Occasionally the plane stopped in the Azores and once in Sigonella, Italy, both of which have U.S. military sites, the person added.

And the Pentagon has so far failed to tell the Oversight Committee why.

Or whether there have been more detours of this type as Prestwick's fuel revenue has presumably gone up another $15 million or so in 2018-19 and Turnberry's revenue was up $3.1 million in 2018 over 2017. In fact the Pentagon hasn't given the committee a single document, though they've had Cummings's letter for almost three months. Between the broad picture you see in those numbers and the detail of the saga of the 176th, it's hard not to suspect that the airport and the Trump Organization are working together to siphon off money from US taxpayers. In fact I'm not going to make any effort to not suspect it.

Via.