House Republicans said they wanted to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics because it overreached and was mean to them. Rep. Duncan Hunter has a primo example of that overreach, and it involves … his pet rabbit. Hunter has had some issues leading to him reimbursing his campaign for more than $60,000 spent on things like oral surgery, video games, and jewelry, and yet his office still wants to talk about how the Office of Congressional Ethics is being unfair to him. So about that rabbit:
In the Press-Enterprise, [Hunter spokesman Joe] Kasper criticized the as-yet-unreleased ethics office report on Hunter, saying “findings or implications are significantly misrepresented or even exaggerated.”
As an example, Kasper mentioned the family rabbit transportation fees.
“(The office) has in their report $600 in campaign expenditures for in cabin rabbit transport fees,” Kasper said. “Since travel is often done on (airline) miles – which is entirely permissible – the credit card connected to the account was charged several times even when his children were flying.”
Perhaps the rabbit expenses are among the $6,000 in air travel reimbursements Hunter has made. But the point, according to his spokesman, is that:
“This was nothing more than an oversight. In fact, it’s such an obvious example of a mistake being made but (the office) wants to view it through a lens of possible intent. The same goes for many other expenditures,” Kasper said. “Many of Rep. Hunter’s repayments had to do with mistakes under specific circumstances, and in other cases there were bona fide campaign activities connected to expenditures that (the office) was not aware of and didn’t account for.”
This was just one $600 rabbit travel oversight among $62,000 in jewelry, video games, resort stays, oral surgery oversights and mistakes under specific circumstances, but the Office of Congressional Ethics wants to make some kind of big deal about it, and that, my friends, is why House Republicans were absolutely right to try to gut the OCE.
If this is the kind of argument Republicans are going to put out in favor of the wildly unpopular things they’ve already had to back off of, I can only say … keep talking, guys!