What is it with blue city and state politicians?
Case in point: District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has been under scrutiny for some time for accepting free travel to places like Las Vegas, Dubai, and Qatar. What possible business would the mayor of the District have in Dubai or Qatar? What did Mayor Bowser have to offer the people who paid for her travel?
That's what the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) is asking. According to a breaking Fox News piece, FACT has filed an ethics complaint against the mayor.
The complaint by the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) requests the Board of Ethics and Government Accountability investigate Bowser for allegedly accepting illegal travel and hospitality gifts on high-profile trips to Doha, Qatar, for the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, and trips to Dubai, Las Vegas, Miami and Mar-a-Lago.
"The basic standard for elected officials is honest transparency, which means following all disclosure laws and willingly answering the public's questions. The mayor's unwillingness to provide basic information about numerous high-profile trips is unacceptable," Kendra Arnold, executive director of FACT, shared first with Fox News Digital.
FACT cited WJLA's investigation into missing records from Bowser's prominent trips, in which they discovered Qatar paid Bowser and four staff members $61,930 to fly to the Middle East in 2023.
The mayor would clearly seem to have broken the rules in accepting these paid trips:
Under Washington, D.C., law, government officials cannot accept certain gifts, including trips, lodging and transportation. The law allows donations to the district itself if the government entity "uses the gift or donation to carry out its authorized functions or duties."
Here's the question: What did the people who funded these trips expect in return? There's no industry or high-tech center in the District that they may want to invest in.
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These trips couldn't have involved any trade deals. State governors sometimes make trips to other parts of the country and even other nations to attend trade or industrial conferences, but the District has no factories, no industries, and no foreign trade. It's a small municipality that supports the federal government. It shares no border with any other country. It's not like the mayor of El Paso, who may want to cross to talk to the mayor of Ciudad Juárez about matters that concern both cities. Mayor Bowser went to Qatar, we might note, to attend a climate summit. Why? What possible reason could there be for the mayor of an American city with no industry and no manufacturing base to attend a conference on climate change?
It's hard to see any reason for Mayor Bowser to be taking lavish trips as gifts, gifts that her status as Mayor of the District prohibits her from accepting. There has to be something else going on. It's difficult to rule out graft.
Muriel Bowser, we might note, has a substantial salary of $220,000. That's pretty good; not exactly Elon Musk or even Donald Trump territory, but enough to pay for her own plane tickets to Las Vegas or even Dubai. But she has instead, according to this complaint, accepted those trips as gifts.
Why? And why is it always blue-state and blue-city politicians who are getting caught up in these things?
You can view FACT's complaint here.
Editor's Note: The Deep State is working overtime to subvert President Trump's agenda and the will of the people.
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