Zinke: Reports on helicopter use are ‘total fabrications’

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Saturday called reports that he used helicopters to fly between his Washington, D.C., office and nearby locations at taxpayer expense “total fabrications.” 

“Recent articles about official Interior Department helicopter usage are total fabrications and a wild departure from reality,” he said in a statement shared in a tweet knocking “DC media” for not reporting truthfully.

Here are the #facts the DC media refuses to print. pic.twitter.com/5tOovaYbnv

— Secretary Ryan Zinke (@SecretaryZinke) December 9, 2017

Travel logs obtained by Politico show that Zinke spent more than $14,000 on the helicopter trips, which were provided by the U.S. Park Police.

Reports by Politico say that one such trip was to an emergency management exercise in Shepherdstown, W.Va., in June.

Another instance saw Zinke and another Interior Department official flying to and from Yorktown, Va., in a single day in July. During the trip, Zinke attended a roundtable discussion with boating industry representatives and visited a site of future high-voltage electric transmission lines, according to Politico.

Zinke on Saturday said, however, that the trips were made to conduct aerial surveys.

{mosads}

“On these instances, I conducted an aerial survey of a million acres of federal monument lands, an aerial survey of [a] power line project which was under scrutiny for possible compensatory migration corruption from the previous administration, and a national command authority directed emergency response exercise.”

Zinke recently completed an ordered review of several federal monuments, which prompted President Trump this week to greatly reduce the size of two monuments in Utah. 

The Interior Department’s inspector general said in October it was investigating Zinke’s use of chartered planes after it was reported Zinke and his aides had taken multiple flights on chartered or military planes to travel to his home state of Montana, as well as to travel to events between two Caribbean islands.

The inspector general has not said whether the helicopter flights in question are part of the ongoing probe, despite calls from Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell (Wash.) for them to be investigated.  

“All of these instances were thoroughly vetted and scrutinized before being approved by the department’s career ethics officers and solicitors,” Zinke added.