The costs to the American people are starting to come in putting a price tag on yet another one of Michelle Obama’s lavish and wholly undeserved vacations–her China trip in this case. We have just learned that her transportation costs alone cost the US Treasury over $360,000.
Judicial Watch has done yeomen’s work digging up the costs of all these dozens of unearned “vacations.” This time it looked at Michelle’s China trip.
Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained records from the U.S. Department of the Air Force revealing that Michelle Obama’s 2014 trip to China cost American taxpayers $362,523.53 in air travel expenses alone. The First Lady, her daughters, and her mother spent March 19 – 26 in China, in a trip highlighted by extended visits to some of the country’s most popular tourist sites.
…According to the newly released records, the transportation costs for the seven-day trip to China were based on a flight cost of $11,092 per hour for the Obama family, and support personnel in a C-32A presidential aircraft. The $362,523.53 air travel expense tab for the Obama entourage was more than 225 times what the average American family spends on an entire week-long vacation.
…“Once again, we find the Obamas abusing the public trust and raiding the taxpayers’ coffers for unnecessarily luxurious travel,” said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “The fact that it took us a full year to obtain this information about the First Lady’s China junket reveals that the ‘most transparent administration in history’ knows that its taxpayer-financed jaunts are so excessively extravagant that it ignores open records law to keep Americans in the dark.”
Judicial Watch uncovered an expensive combination of trips by the Obamas to Africa and Honolulu, which cost taxpayers $15,885,585.30 in flight expenses alone. The single largest prior known expense for accommodations was for Michelle Obama’s side-trip to Dublin, Ireland, during the 2013 G-8 conference in Belfast, when she and her entourage booked 30 rooms at the five-star Shelbourne Hotel, with the first lady staying in the 1500 square-foot Princess Grace suite at a cost of $3,500 a night. The total cost to taxpayers for the Obamas’ Ireland trip was $7,921,638.66. To date, the known beyond-first-class travel expenses of the Obamas and Vice President Joe Biden exceed $57 million.
What a monumental waste of our tax dollars for queen Michelle’s many, many “vacations.”