Dem report: White House directed trips to help GOP

A draft congressional report released Wednesday charges that the White House directed hundreds of taxpayer-funded trips by federal agency officials to benefit GOP candidates in the 2006 midterm elections. 

The draft report, authored by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, states that administration officials participated in 326 events with GOP candidates from Jan. 1, 2006, to Election Day on Nov. 7.

{mosads}Those trips were made at the suggestion of the White House’s Office of Political Affairs, according to the report. The vast majority of the trips, 303, were made outside of the Washington area. Overall, 32 officials from 12 different Cabinet-level agencies and three independent agencies participated in the events. 

The committee interviewed Ken Mehlman, the first director of political affairs for President Bush, along with other White House officials. The report quotes Mehlman as saying it was “a big part” of his job to “help elect allies of the president.”

But the committee’s ranking Republican, Rep. Tom Davis (Va.), dismissed the report, saying it ignored similar statistics from past administrations.

“They set out to find banned political activity in the White House,” Davis said in a statement.  “Instead, the committee Democrats found the same kinds of things done by every administration since Eisenhower. Their angry swooning just doesn’t pass the smell test.”

Davis also implied the committee’s true intention was to overwhelm the Republican National Committee with subpoenas for documents. The RNC spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to comply with those requests, according to the Virginia Republican.

“It was an unprecedented use of majority authority to, in effect, defund the opposition,” Davis said.