The Government Accounting Office (GAO) works directly for the Congress. In a recent report to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the GAO reminds that federal agencies are required to report trips taken by senior officials on government aircraft unless the trips are classified. The point of this reporting is to make sure officials are not using taxpayer money to fly government planes for personal travel (“non-mission purposes.”) But wouldn’t you know it, the General Services Administration, the executive branch’s kind of one-stop administrative and office manager, created a handy reporting exemption that covers intelligence agencies, even in cases of unclassified personal travel. A CIA official, even if using a government airplane to visit her son at college, would not have to report that misuse to the supposed watchdog agency because of that exemption. The exemption as written by the executive branch never defined what constitutes an “intelligence agency” for this purpose.
So Attorney General Holder and former FBI Director Mueller decided on their own, without oversight, that the intelligence agency exemption also applied to them. They never reported their personal use of government aircraft. GAO investigators, however, pried loose enough information to show Holder, Mueller and other Justice Department executives took 395 unclassified, non-mission flights between fiscal years 2009 and 2010, at a cost to taxpayers $7.8 million. Maybe that's chump change dollar-wise in the overall flood of government waste and fraud, but it certainly does not set a good example when two of the nation's top law enforcement officials cheat over chump change. Worse yet, the GAO found Holder’s use of FBI aircraft, which are supposed to be reserved for the agency’s own operations, could hinder the agency’s operations. Since the FBI always has to have a plane on standby for emergency purposes, the agency has had to lease another aircraft while theirs was being used to ferry Justice Department officials.
