Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill recently launched an RV tour of her state to show voters how in touch she is with them. She also supplemented her travel with her private plane.
Brent Scher of the Washington Free Beacon broke the story:
Claire McCaskill’s Private Plane Used on Campaign’s RV Tour Through MissouriSen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) said her campaign was “hitting the road” in an RV to tour the state, but public flight information indicates that travel also occurred on her million-dollar private plane.The RV, named BigBlue by the campaign, was unveiled late last month by McCaskill, who said she was “very excited to hit the road” in it for an upcoming “Veterans for Claire” tour. The campaign kept a live blog of its three-day RV trip from May 29 to May 31, posting updates of its whereabouts.Unmentioned on the blog is the role McCaskill’s private plane played on the trip. The aircraft is a single-engine turboprop valued on her financial disclosure forms at more than $1 million dollars.McCaskill has taken steps to hide the use of her plane. In a 2017 email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the senator asked the Federal Aviation Administration to block radar tracking information on her plane from being publicly broadcast on the internet. The request blocks the ability to track her plane on websites such as FlightAware.com.
Here’s the super cool RV that McCaskill spent some time riding in during her tour:
Scher notes that at certain points the RV and the plane followed the same route:
The GPS-based data transmitted by McCaskill’s plane for the days of her RV tour across Missouri indicates that it was used to travel between campaign stops.On Tuesday, May 29, for example, McCaskill’s tour took her from Waynesville in central Missouri, west to Springfield, and then further west to nearby Joplin, according to the campaign’s blog.The plane, according to the tracking data for the day, took the same route as the campaign RV.
McCaskill’s plane has been an issue for her for some time. The National Republican Senatorial Committee released this ad in the fall of 2017:
Elana Schor of Politico has more on this:
McCaskill used private plane on campaign RV tourSen. Claire McCaskill confirmed Tuesday that she used her private plane during a three-day RV tour of her state last month, an admission that promises to become a political headache for the Missouri Democrat in her reelection bid.McCaskill claimed that a report on her air travel in The Washington Free Beacon, which used aircraft tracking data to map the plane’s path following her RV tour for two of its three days, was “not accurate.” However, she went further than the publication did in confirming that she did use a plane for part of the tour.”I added some stops with the use of the plane, but I was on the RV so much that the broken drawer drove me crazy,” McCaskill said in a brief Tuesday interview in the Capitol, adding that “I even lost an iPad around a corner on the RV.”…McCaskill’s GOP challenger, Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, slammed McCaskill as “out of touch” after the report on her travel in the conservative Free Beacon.“She has completely lost touch with reality,“ Hawley said in an interview, adding that McCaskill “has lived in the DC corridor“ for long enough to have “no inkling“ of how her state operates.
Hawley published this tweet yesterday:
Featured image via YouTube.
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