Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said Saturday that claims that he spent thousands of taxpayer dollars using Interior Department helicopters are a “wild departure from reality.”
“Recent articles about official Interior Department helicopter usage are total fabrications and a wild departure from reality,” the secretary said in a statement.
Politico reported last week that Zinke spent over $14,000 of taxpayer dollars on personal helicopter travel to and from events within a few hours of his office in Washington, D.C.
Zinke is already under investigation by the department’s inspector general and the Office of Special Counsel for mixing business and political travel.
Zinke’s statement provided no proof disputing the numbers in Politico’s latest report. “On these instances, I conducted an aerial survey of a million acres of federal monument lands, an aerial survey of power line project which was under scrutiny for possible compensatory mitigation corruption from the previous administration, and a national command authority directed emergency response exercise,” he said.
Here are the #facts the DC media refuses to print. pic.twitter.com/5tOovaYbnv
— Secretary Ryan Zinke (@SecretaryZinke) December 9, 2017
“All of these instances were thoroughly vetted and scrutinized before being approved by the Department’s career ethics officers and solicitors,” he added. “Since I took the helm at Interior, the Office of the Secretary reduced the annual cost of the noncommercial airfare compared to the previous two secretaries and we will continue to use government resources efficiently.”
Zinke’s statement comes after a spokesperson for the department told the Washington Examiner that recent reports on the secretary are “complete garbage and yellow journalism at its worst.”
