Solar Eclipse Watching on Top of $200 Billion in Gold
Did Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his wife, actress and film producer Louise Linton, take a federal government plane, at a cost of up to $10,000 per hour, so they could have a great view of Monday’s solar eclipse?
They couple have been in the news all week. They traveled to Kentucky on Monday, on a federal government plane – proof of which Linton infamously posted to Instagram, hashtagging it with the designer brands she was wearing.
We all know how that ended: she blasted a woman who criticized her blatant display of wealth and privilege while visiting one of the country’s most poverty-stricken states. Linton’s publicist later issued her “apology,” which was anything but sincere and genuine.
Along the way, as NCRM reported, one newspaper mentioned that the couple had watched Monday’s solar eclipse on their trip, and that caught the eye of CREW, a watchdog group who has since demanded documents related to the trip to determine if it was scheduled to allow Mnuchin and Linton to view the solar eclipse atop Fort Knox – which, along with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), they did.
McConnell even posted a photo to Facebook, eclipse-watching glasses in hand (photo above.)
“It turns out that Mnuchin did view the eclipse while he was in Kentucky, and from an extraordinary place: Just outside the path of totality, from the roof of the nation’s fabled Fort Knox, atop nearly $200 billion in American gold,” The Washington Post reports.Â
Mnuchin’s Treasury Dept. is pushing back, insisting there was nothing untoward with the trip, one that Mnuchin himself bragged was the first visit to Ft. Knox by a Treasury Secretary in decades:
“Treasury officials said Thursday that the trip was planned explicitly around ‘official government travel,’ rejecting the idea that the Fort Knox visit and the appearance at a luncheon for the local chamber of commerce were mere cover,” The Post adds.
But federal government policy is for government officials, even cabinet secretaries, who are traveling domestically to use commercial airlines, as the Post notes:
Defense Department policy calls government air transportation “a premium mode of travel involving high costs and limited resources†and urges federal employees to make “every effort . . . to minimize travel cost.â€
CREW may or may not get to the bottom of this imbroglio, but what’s clear to all is this administration, including its Secretary of the Treasury and his wife, have only themselves in mind.Â
And those who voted for them have only themselves to blame.
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