Politico: How We Found Tom Price's Private Jets

[ehrnst]

From a vague tip in May to airport stakeouts in September: How Rachana Pradhan and Dan Diamond found Tom Price's private jets.

A tantalizing tip, followed by months of painstaking reporting, revealed the HHS secretary’s extravagant travel habits.

The first tip came from a casual conversation with a source back in May: Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was using private jets for routine travel, possibly in violation of federal travel rules that allowed such flights only when commercial options weren’t available.

But it was a tip and little else—no times, no names of charter services and not even a schedule from a notoriously secretive Cabinet secretary.

So we embarked on a months-long effort to win the trust of sources, both in and outside of HHS, who were in a position to know about the secretary’s travel. This required numerous meetings and phone calls, sometimes after hours, seeking to confirm what the original source acknowledged was just secondhand information. Neither of us had ever reported a story of this difficulty before.

Price’s lack of transparency made our job harder. In the initial months following his confirmation on February 10, he hadn’t made his schedule public, unlike past secretaries. Bare-bones reports of events outside Washington usually were posted on the agency’s website after they happened. But there were few places and times—not enough information to take either to charter services, sources inside HHS or anyone else in a position to know about the flights. And we faced another problem: Because the planes Price was taking were private, their arrivals and departures weren’t recorded on public databases.

That meant we had to re-create Price’s schedule from scratch if we were to have any hope of matching his trips to chartered flights. We reviewed the HHS summaries of Price’s meetings. We scoured news sites for reports of Price speeches outside Washington. We obsessively tracked his appearances on social media. Putting all this information together, we built a database of Price’s trips.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/04/how-we-found-tom-prices-private-jets-215680

[Sneederbunk]

1. Thank you for nailing this crook.

[ehrnst]

2. Wasn't me - just sharing the story. (nt)

[NCjack]

3. Old fashion reporting. Dig, dig, and dig some more. No living on govt news briefing -- they will

never tell on themselves. But, not a good idea to give any characterization of sources. Trump sniffer dogs are now chewing on HHS insiders, trying to find the disloyal to Trump and tools.

[Scarsdale]

11. Just read that Rick Perry

also uses private planes. They will HAVE to raise taxes on ordinary citizens, to afford these grifters.

[NCjack]

13. Ryan will pay their bills with a tax cut. nt

[Scarsdale]

14. What bills?

They use taxpayer money.

[NCjack]

16. Travel costs. The money has to be paid. The money to make the payment will be

gained by a tax cut. I know it doesn't make sense to people who look at traditional balance sheets, or balance their checkbooks, but Republicans like Ryan think that govt can pay its bills by first using tax cuts. They believe that any tax cut stimulates the economy, brings in more tax revenue than the tax cut, and that increase in revenue over powers the pending bills to be paid. I think it is called "fuzzy math". It doesn't work.

[HipChick]

4. Good article....great read

[gratuitous]

5. Interesting

Didn't Candidate Trump promise the most transparent administration ever? And yet, one of his cabinet members is so secretive, it takes months to figure out where he's been and who he's meeting with. I wonder if, after asking Sarah Sanders if today is a good day to talk about firearm regulation (spoiler alert: No), anyone can ask her about the administration's failure to be quite as transparent as promised?

[FakeNoose]

18. Price's trips were secretive

...because he's Trump's bagman, picking up under-the-table campaign donations. Also he was the go-between making sure the bigtime donors were getting their money's worth. (Getting the legislation they paid for.)

Now that Price is gone, who's going to fill that role? Pence stopped doing it awhile ago. I'd guess Betsy DeVos (maybe) but it's doubtful that Cheeto would ever trust a woman. So we have to remain vigilant, the Cabinet appointees are all bagmen to a certain extent. Even Tillerson. They're all breaking the law one way or another.

[Phoenix61]

6. That's what great investigative journalism

looks like and why it is so necessary for true democracy to survive.

[avebury]

7. This is the type of reporting that might take down the grifters

in the WH administration.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

8. Deep state FTW.

The beauty of this is that it came about as a result of a leak from the inside.

Someone in HHS dropped the dime on Price. It might have been someone who processes the travel requests, or maybe it was someone who keeps track of the motor pool. Whoever it was, he or she takes the Blue/Orange/Silver Line to work every day and has done so for years (well, not the Silver Line) and puts in a forty-hour work week. He or she was sufficiently ticked off to spill the beans and call Politico.

Hat tip to you, conscientious worker! And to you too, Politico, for digging into this.

Well done, good and faithful {civil} servant.

[spanone]

9. K&R...

[sheshe2]

10. Great detective work...

By Pradhan and Diamond, good job.

Thanks for the article, ehrnst!

[AllaN01Bear]

12. wasnt there a jet gate simalr to this in the bush , bush and ray gun eras ?

now if a democrat did this ,,,,, ohm myyyyy!!!!

[chia]

15. K & R

[justhanginon]

17. Great job! Now that slimy bastard is out of government and

at least for the present can do less harm to our country. There are still so many of them left but hope springs eternal that we can rid ourselves of them also.

[mountain grammy]

19. Good Job!

Get these grifters!

[LAS14]

20. Neat!! Thanks for this! nt

[cp]

21. Great reporting!

Thank you. Investigative journalism is essential to our democracy. These reporters did a superb job, and thanks, too, to the unknown insider who tipped them off.