Livin' large.
Rep. Aaron Schock, better known as the
Downton Abbey Congressman, seems to be in
more trouble.
Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock, a rising Republican star already facing an ethics inquiry, has spent taxpayer and campaign funds on flights aboard private planes owned by some of his key donors, The Associated Press has found.
What's the problem? According to House Ethics Rules, you're not supposed to do that. Or at least you weren't—in 2013 the Republican House changed their rules to allow it, presumably because the thought of not being able to fly on campaign donors' private planes was just making too many wanderlust-afflicted representatives sad.
Of special note is how the AP found out about the likely rule breaking.
The AP tracked Schock's reliance on the aircraft partly through the congressman's penchant for uploading pictures and videos of himself to his Instagram account. The AP extracted location data associated with each image then correlated it with flight records showing airport stopovers and expenses later billed for air travel against Schock's office and campaign records.
Which is actually some damn fine reporting, right there. And it wouldn't have been possible if Schock didn't spend so much time taking selfies—let this be a lesson to you youngsters out there. No selfies on a campaign donor's private jet, you got that?
Beyond air travel, Schock spent thousands more on tickets for concerts, car mileage reimbursements — among the highest in Congress — and took his interns to a sold-out Katy Perry concert in Washington last June.
Whether or not any of this results in another ethics investigation against Schock is unclear, but his penchant for living large on the taxpayer dime seems especially wounding to his party's insistence on cutting waste, fraud and abuse in government. If some government functionary redecorated his office in lavish fashion, insisted on private plane flights when commercial flights would do, or regularly took their staff to concerts paid for by the taxpayers there wouldn't just be hearings, there'd be Fox News special reports and outraged town halls and the whole episode would be used as reason to shut down that portion of government entirely.
Apparently it's not taxpayer waste that riles them up, but competition. As for Schock, this should give an inclination of how serious these charges could get:
Schock has hired William McGinley and Don McGahn of the Washington law firm Jones Day to lead his legal team. Veteran GOP communications operatives Ron Bonjean and Brian Walsh are helping manage his response, according to sources close to the matter.
Yep, that sounds pretty serious all right.