Michelle Obama’s trip to China last year ran taxpayers more than $360,000 on air transportation alone, according to records from the U.S. Department of the Air Force.
The First Lady, who was accompanied by her daughters and her mother, embarked on the trip in March 2014. Judicial Watch later filed a Freedom of Information Act Request for details on its costs June 19, 2014. More than a year later, they’ve finally obtained the records.
"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," Judicial Watch writes. "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."
Judicial Watch notes that despite the trip being said to forward an education agenda, the Obama family also did their fair share of sightseeing.
"Though the White House billed the China trip as an effort by Michelle Obama to push her education agenda, much of the Obama family’s time was spent at popular tourist sightseeing venues. According to Diplomat.com, "The First Lady, daughters Malia and Sasha, and mother Marian Robinson visited Beijing’s Forbidden City and Summer Palace as well as the Great Wall, the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi’an, and the Chengdu Panda Base."
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, commented that this is another abuse of public trust by the Obamas.
"Once again, we find the Obamas abusing the public trust and raiding the taxpayers’ coffers for unnecessarily luxurious travel," Fitton said. "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."