One thing about Socialists: They loooove to spend other people’s money.
So it’s no surprise that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) forked out nearly $300,000 flying around on private jets in a single month.
“According to federal campaign finance reports, Friends of Bernie Sanders, the senator’s official 2018 Senate campaign committee, spent $297,685.50 with Apollo Jets, a private charter jet service headquartered in New York,” the website VtDigger.com reported. “The report does not break down the number of trips or where they were taken. The check was issued on Oct. 10, according to the report.”
Sanders — who appears likely to run for president again in 2020 — went to nine battleground states to stump for Democratic Party candidates prior to the November mid-term elections. The tour was also considered a way to test support for another presidential run. Sanders ran for president in 2016, finishing behind Hilary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.
Sanders’ cross country tour included stops in Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina, early caucus and primary states in 2020. He also went as far as California to help other candidates.
“This expense was for transportation for the senator’s 9-day, 9-state tour to support Democratic candidates up and down the ballot ahead of Election Day,” campaign spokesman Arianna Jones told VtDigger.com. “This cost covered the entirety of the tour from Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, South Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, California, and back to Vermont,” she said.
Jones said Sanders used private jets “to allow the senator to campaign in all of the states where candidates wanted his help and get back to Vermont in order to join the Vermont Democratic Party coordinated campaign’s final GOTV efforts. As Bernie often said while encouraging voters to get involved leading up to Election Day, this was the most important midterm election in our lifetimes and he wanted to have maximum impact.”
The spokesman also told VtDigger that the campaign “purchased carbon offsets to support renewable energy projects and invest in carbon reduction projects to balance out emissions produced from travel. She said the campaign paid $4,980.00 to NativeEnergy for carbon offsets.”
It’s not the first time Sanders, who says global warming is causing “devastating problems,” has used the private jet service, which says on its website that it is “dedicated to providing a luxury flight experience based on superior safety and exceptional customer care.” In 2017, the senator spent nearly $40,000 during the third quarter of the year.
In 2014, Sanders wrote in an op-ed for the Huffington Post that “the scientific community is clear: Global warming is real and it is caused by human activity. In terms of droughts, heat waves, floods, forest fires, disease, rising sea levels and extreme weather disturbances, global warming is already causing devastating problems.”
Sanders also said during a Democratic primary debate in 2016 that he’d introduced in the Senate the “most comprehensive climate change legislation” to date.
“One day after the debate, Sanders took a Delta 767 chartered flight to Rome, Italy, to address ‘immoral and unsustainable’ wealth inequality at the Vatican conference, the Daily Mail reported last year. Fewer than 50 individuals were said to be on the plane that could seat between 211 and 261 people,” The Washington Free Beacon reported.