Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke ended up spending thousands of dollars in taxpayers money to use government helicopters to travel to and from Washington, D.C., including a trip to ride horses with the Vice President.
Politico managed to obtain copies of Zinke’s travel logs through a Freedom of Information Act request and found that more than $14,000 was on government helicopters.
The trips were justified as being for work purposes.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, right, spent thousands of taxpayer dollars on government helicopter rides to go to official events, including riding horses with Vice President Mike Pence
Zinke’s helicopter trips this summer cost over $14,000 according to travel log records obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Politico
On one occasion, $8,000 was spent for a U.S. Park Police helicopter to take Zinke and his chief of staff to an emergency management exercise in West Virginia despite the location being a mere two hour drive away from Washington.
The helicopter ride was justified with the pair saying they were unable to leave the capital until 2pm.
Another $6,250 was spent on a round-trip flight for Zinke to ride horses with Mike Pence in Yorktown, Virginia as part of a battlefield tour. The trip would have taken just three hours by car.
Zinke’s office justified the travel as official business.
The inspector general’s office at the Interior Department was already investigating Zinke’s use of taxpayer-funded charter flights after he came under fire for such travel along with other members of the Trump administration, including Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke reportedly spent $6,250 on a government helicopter ride so he could go horseback riding with Mike Pence, pictured
Zinke and his staffers appeared to travel on charter or military planes to attend events in Montana and to islands in the Caribbean.
Last month Zinke came under scrutiny for his office expenses which appeared to be spiraling.
Zinke spent on decorating his secretary’s suite to his liking which saw him mounting the heads of bison and elk on the wall as well a moving a large taxidermy grizzly bear around.
Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, has had similar issues in the past. While on official military orders in the late 1990s, Zinke made some restoration work on a childhood home, and he was eventually forced to repay some unauthorized expenses to the Navy.