Cost Of Gabbard’s Trip To Syria And Lebanon? $9,000
The Hawaii congresswoman has reimbursed an Ohio Arab-American community group for the expenses, but she has not completed all the necessary paperwork.
As promised, U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has paid for her recent trip to the Middle East out of her own pocket, records show.
But the documents are incomplete and do not include her specific itinerary as well as details on who initially paid for the trip, which took place last month.
Filings Monday with the House Clerk’s Office show the total cost of the visits to Syria and Lebanon was $8,894.
Transportation from Washington, D.C., for Gabbard was $4,125. Other expenses included $1,350 for lodging, $284 for meals and $100 for parking.
Expenses for her spouse, Abraham Williams, were $2,775 for transportation and $260 for meals.
The payments went to the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services based in Cleveland and known as AACCESS-Ohio.
Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii, was required to file her travel forms within 15 days of her Jan. 22 return to the United States. She departed Jan. 14, skipping Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The congresswoman filed two of the four required forms by the Monday deadline: a completed Sponsor Post-Travel Disclosure Form and a letter from the Committee on Ethics approving trip.
She missed the Monday deadline, however, to file a Primary Trip Sponsor Form and the second page of a completed Traveler Form.
Civil Beat emailed Gabbard’s office Tuesday afternoon asking about the missing documents.
About a half-hour later, Gabbard tweeted this message to her 58,000 followers: “FYI: Per ethics regs, Rep Tulsi Gabbard filed her post-trip financial report yesterday & will file additional forms and itinerary tomorrow.”
Ten minutes later, Gabbard spokeswoman Emily Latimer directed Civil Beat to the same tweet.
FYI: Per ethics regs, Rep Tulsi Gabbard filed her post-trip financial report yesterday & will file additional forms and itinerary tomorrow
— Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiPress)
Gabbard’s trip has been praised by supporters who say she is advocating for peace and trying to stop U.S. funding of terrorist groups in the regime.
Critics, however, have questioned her meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad, who many revile as a mass murder largely responsible for Syria’s civil war and refugee crisis.
On Tuesday, reported that , a prominent human rights group, concluded the Assad government may have executed as many as 13,000 people in a Syrian prison as part of a “secret crackdown on dissent.”
“Beatings. Starvation. Rape. And then death, administered quickly and with sickening efficiency,” , noting that Amnesty International referred to the the prison as a “slaughterhouse.”
Also on Tuesday, Gabbard was scheduled to hold a telephone town hall to talk about her bill, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, and the visit to Syria. She was to be joined by “my special guest, Tima Kurdi, a woman from Syria who is a champion for refugees worldwide,” according to a press release from her office.
Kurdi is the aunt of the boy washed up on a Turkish beach in 2016. The photograph was widely published.
