Watchdogs ask House to suspend privately paid trips

Citing revelations about an all-expenses-paid trip to Azerbaijan by Texas lawmakers and others, a group of congressional watchdog organizations is asking new House Speaker Paul Ryan to suspend privately-financed foreign trips until new rules are put in place.

“Recent embarrassing revelations about trips by Members and staff of the U.S. House of Representatives from both parties highlight the failure of current travel rules to protect the integrity of the House,” the groups said in a twopage letter to Ryan. “Until the American public can have confidence that the House rules and practices adequately disclose who is paying for their elected Representatives’ foreign travel and protect against special interests gaining inappropriate access to Members and staff through these trips related to Members’ official duties, all privately-financed foreign trips should be halted.”

The letter was sent on Thursday by the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Democracy 21 and the League of Women voters, among others.

The moratorium request follows the decision by the House Ethics Committee to clear lawmakers who participated in a 2013 trip to an energy conference in Azerbaijan that appears to have been funded by that nation’s state oil company through a pair of Houston nonprofit groups.

Among those who took part in the conference were Texas Democrats Sheila

“Recent embarassing revelations about trips by Members and staff of the U.S. House ... from both parties highlight the failure of current travel rules to protect the integrity of the House.” Letter sent by watchdog groups

Jackson Lee and Ruben Hinojosa, as well as two Republicans from Texas, Ted Poe and Steve Stockman.

The Ethics Committee ruled in July that while the funding for the trip might have been improper, the lawmakers involved appear to have been misled about the true source of the funding.

Congressional investigators said they would refer the matter to the Justice Department to determine whether Houston businessman Kemal Oksuz and other “third parties” involved in arranging the travel engaged in a “criminal conspiracy to lie to Congress.”

The groups called on Ryan to create a bipartisan task force to study the problem.

“The amount of privately-sponsored travel, once slashed by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA) to one-third its previous levels, is again rising to near the level of the Jack Abramoff travel junket era,” the groups asserted.

Ryan’s office said that as of Monday he had not responded to the groups’ demand.