Donald Trump press secretary reveals president’s bank details

Team Udayavani, May 23, 2020, 4:49 PM IST

Washington: Revealing a little too much, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany committed a gaffe by disclosing President Donald Trump’s bank information while displaying a cheque donating his quarterly salary to the Department of Health and Human Services.

As McEnany held the cheque to show it to the reporters on Friday, it not only had the USD 100,000 amount to be given to the HHS but also displayed the president’s private bank account and routing numbers, The New York Times reported.

The donation was as per the quarterly tradition of Trump to forgo his USD 400,000 salary and donate it.

In the past, Trump has donated to the Small Business Administration initiative to help veteran entrepreneurs, to the Office of the Surgeon General to fight the opioid epidemic, and to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, among other places.

According to the nbcnews.com, the donation to HHS is being made to develop new therapies for treating and preventing coronavirus.

“Here is the cheque,” McEnany said as she held the cheque, which appeared to be a real Capital One bearing not just the president’s name and signature, but also his bank information.

The address of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and other personal details, like accounting and routing numbers, were also visible on the cheque, the nbcnews.com report said.

The New York Times report quoted an administration official as saying that mock checks were never used in the briefing.

Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said that Trump’s salary went to help advance new therapies to treat this virus, “but leave it to the media to find a shameful reason not to simply report the facts, focusing instead on whether the cheque is real or not.

However, there were concerns over the revelation of the president’s bank details in the media.

It’s not a best practice to share that information publicly, Eva Velasquez, the president and chief executive of the Identity Theft Resource Center, was quoted as saying in the report.

If you don’t have protections in place, there are sophisticated schemes and ways someone could access those funds knowing the account and routing number and the individual person it belongs to, she said.