Hillary Clinton Spent $225K On Private Jet Travel That You Paid For

Hillary Clinton regularly flew on private jets while a U.S. Senator, and the government sent the bill to the taxpayers amounting to about $225,000.

The total cost for the travel as a senator for eight years in office is what she generally earns for just one speech as a private citizen before corporate or other groups.

The six-figure amount for plane trips for Hillary did not include funding for her large entourage as well as taxpayer-paid Secret Service bodyguards who also travel with her.

Clinton is, or was, hardly the only Senator of either party to travel on charter flights; fellow Democrat Mary Landrieu, for example, ran into some headwinds during her re-election campaign for extensive taxpayer-funded travel. Landrieu wound up losing big in the Louisiana runoff to GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy.

U.S. Senators collectively spent about $1 million of taxpayer money on private jet travel in 2013.

The details on Clinton’s Senate travel were disclosed by Bloomberg Business and based on public records.

Hillary Clinton took more than 200 privately chartered flights at taxpayer expense during her eight years in the U.S. Senate, sometimes using the jets of corporations and major campaign donors as she racked up $225,756 in flight costs. Clinton, 67, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, reported the travel in official filings with the Senate. The records were provided to Bloomberg News by a Republican operative. Some of the companies whose planes she used included Coca-Cola Co., Citigroup Inc. and Saban Capital Group Inc.”

Hillary Clinton left the Senate in January, 2009, to become U.S. Secretary of State, a position she held until resigning as of February 1, 2013.

If she does run for president next year as the standard-bearer for the Democrats, Clinton apparently intends to make income inequality a cornerstone of her political campaign. She and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, however, have amassed a fortune in the range of $100 million to $200 million mainly from corporate speechmaking. During her recent, ill-fated book tour, Hillary Clinton nonetheless claimed that the couple was “dead broke” when they left the White House and that currently they aren’t “truly well off.”

A Clinton aide justified the private jet travel given the then-Senator’s “tireless work” in meeting with constituents all over the state of New York.

Reacting to the Hillary Clinton frequent flying, The Washington Free Beacon observed that “That works out to one flight every other week on the taxpayer’s dime…That Hillary flew on a Citigroup jet comes as no surprise, given that the Wall Street firm–and target of Elizabeth Warren’s ire–is her largest source of political donations over the course of her career.”

As the Inquisitr previously reported, Hillary Clinton delivered a speech at UNLV in October for which she banked $225,000, a fee which stirred up a lot of controversy in the university community. As part of her standard contract for all such presentations, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Clinton insists on a presidential suite in a luxury hotel and private jet transportation among many other rockstar-like perks.

[image via mistydawnphoto / Shutterstock.com]