Former Attorney General Eric Holder was one of the officials whose travel was included in the tally. Education Department
FBI Spends Up to One-Third of Its Aviation Budget on Executive Travel, Documents Show
Bureau says spending on travel for top officials including former Attorney General Eric Holder did not cut into operational work.
The FBI spent as much as one-third of its aviation budget on transportation of high-level executives, during a period that included travel cuts due to sequestration, newly released documents show.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, in 2012 inquired about then-Attorney General Eric Holder’s use of FBI aircraft for trips not always mission-related, when the planes might have been needed for FBI operations.
As first reported on Monday by International Business Times, the bureau responded that up to one third of the FBI’s aviation budget from 2008 to 2012 went toward executive transportation. That included trips by the FBI director and other top bureau officials, as well as the attorney general.
“While certain FBI aircraft are utilized for executive transport when not operationally tasked, any travel by DoJ executives is secondary to the FBI's operational work,” the FBI told Smith in a letter obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Government Attic.org. “Therefore, no FBI operational flight was cancelled due to executive travel.”
Air travel by Holder, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and other Justice Department officials using FBI aircraft was in keeping with personal security procedures, the FBI noted, though the officials are supposed to reimburse the government for the cost of personal trips.
The scope of personal trips by officials was examined in a 2013 Government Accountability Office report, and a subsequent report called on the General Services Administration to better document the exceptions on reimbursement requirements allowed to intelligence community executives.
Last April, Holder told lawmakers he had provided all required information on his flights. “Just so that people understand that we're making appropriate use of DoJ aircraft," Holder said, "a lot of this stuff was described as mission and nonmission, and the way in which that was defined was not necessarily correct, because ... for instance, the trip that I took to Newtown [Conn.] to visit the school after the shooting, was described as a nonmission trip."
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