Louisiana U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu issued an apology Friday when she released the results of an internal investigation which showed that she improperly used $33,700 in taxpayers’ money to pay for 43 charter flights since 2002.
The release comes four days after Landrieu promised to release the results of the investigation, which was sparked last month after Politico and CNN found that the Democrat had used taxpayer money to pay for campaign activity.
Federal law and senate rules prohibits the use of official expense accounts for campaign purposes. Such activities must be paid for by the members’ campaign.
Landrieu, who took office in 1997 and is facing Republican Bill Cassidy in a November re-election bid, published a table showing all of the flights she has taken since 2002, when federal election rules changed to require members to prorate their expenses between official and campaign business if campaigning constitutes more than 15 percent of time spent on a given trip.
According to the table, Landrieu’s campaign underpaid $33,727.02 — or 11 percent of the total cost — for the charter flights.
That activity ramped up in the middle of 2012, records indicate. Nearly all of the charter flights from Aug. 21, 2012 forward show that Landrieu invoiced the flights to her senate office rather than her campaign.
For example, the entry for a March 19 trip shows that Landrieu attended a total of 18 events — 13 of which involved campaigning. Out of a total of 34 working hours for the trip, Landrieu spent nearly 28 hours on the campaign trail.
She invoiced $3,390 for the cost of that flight, though her campaign should have covered it.
“The review I ordered last month found these mistakes stemming from sloppy book keeping,” Landrieu said in a statement. “I take full responsibility. They should have never happened, and I apologize for this.”
“A new system has been established that has been successfully used by a number of senate offices to provide a safeguard from this happening in the future,” she continued.
Earlier Friday, the Republican National Committee released its own audit which found that Landrieu had invoiced nine charter flights between 2000 and 2008 to her senate expense account, though the trips coincided with campaign events in which Landrieu raised over $130,000. (RELATED: Report: Sen. Landrieu Took Nine More ‘Suspicious’ Flights)
The RNC issued a statement after Landrieu’s release, which it called a “Friday news dump.”
“Forty-three inappropriately billed flights and misuse of tens of thousands in taxpayer dollars is a slap in the face to Louisianans,” RNC chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. “The sheer number of flights on the taxpayer dime warrants a more detailed investigation, Senator Landrieu needs to open her books to a purely independent investigation.”
In a letter to the Senate Ethics Committee, Marc Elias, Landrieu’s attorney, said that the campaign was cutting a check for the underpaid amount to the Department of Treasury.