Former Congressional Ethics Chair: My $16,000 African Safari Was to Research Al Qaeda

Rep. Jo Bonner responds to MoJo’s investigation of the trip he and two other GOPers took to Kenya in 2012.

Rep. Jo Bonner Pete Marovich/ZUMApress.com

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Rep. Jo Bonner (R-Ala.), the former chairman of the House ethics committee, has responded to questions Mother Jones first raised about the all-expenses paid trip to a Kenyan estate that he, two other GOP lawmakers, and members of their families took in August 2012, claiming that he was visiting the site where the Oscar-winning film Out of Africa was shot in order to learn about supposed connections between poaching and Al Qaeda.

As Mother Jones noted in a recent investigation, the estate the lawmakers visited is owned by the trust of a secretive French American family under investigation by French authorities for tax evasion and other misdeeds. The trip was organized by the International Conservation Caucus Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit that is backed by polluting companies as well as four of the world’s largest environmental groups and spends much of its budget sending members of Congress on trips. The group was founded by a former lobbyist for African dictators who met with the lawmakers abroad.

New House rules Bonner signed off on in December 2012 sought to limit privately sponsored travel to nonprofits “with legitimate interests in providing appropriate fact finding opportunities to Members of Congress.” But when I asked Bonner what made the weeklong, $16,214.66 Kenyan excursion he and his wife enjoyed appropriate, he didn’t respond—until Wednesday. (The story hit newsstands in January and first appeared online on Tuesday.)

“It is disappointing, but not surprising, that Mother Jones’ [sic] mischaracterized what was an approved conservation fact-finding trip to Africa,” Bonner told the Alabama Media Group newspaper chain. “My participation was fully vetted by the non-partisan committee staff who determined that the trip was in full compliance with all House rules. The trip was privately funded by the International Conservation Caucus Foundation with no taxpayer dollars used at all.”

Bonner claimed that “the article implies I led the delegation.” It did not, although the congressman may have gotten that false impression if he didn’t read past the headline on the print version of the story (“The Bonner Party”).

His other points, however, are mostly true. And that’s precisely the difficulty, according to Public Citizen lobbyist Craig Holman. “Sadly to say, [the trip] does comply with the loophole-ridden ethics rules that [Bonner’s] committee has developed,” he said. “The problem is, it does not comply with what was originally intended” with the post-Jack Abramoff scandal lobbying reforms, Holman added.

“It was clearly intended that any lobbying entity that has business pending before Congress does not sponsor travel junkets,” explained Holman, who helped craft the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. That’s certainly the case with ICCF funders like ExxonMobil, whose oil profits would be hit hard by the carbon-pricing bills Democratic lawmakers have recently introduced, or the Nature Conservancy, which depends on million-dollar EPA grants like this to fund its annual budget of nearly a billion dollars.

The reason those rules don’t apply to groups like the ICCF, which is funded by lobbyists and organizations that hire lobbyists, is because “Bonner’s ethics committee has decided those regulations won’t apply to nonprofits,” Holman said. “With that devastating blow, they have essentially crippled the travel restrictions.”

The fact that taxpayer dollars weren’t used is beside the point. “The problem is that lobbyist and special-interest money is being used to pay for the trip. It’s being financed by groups and people who want something in return from Bonner,” Holman said.

The Alabama congressman added that “one of the primary areas of focus during the visit” to a private ranch—featuring a golf course, racetrack, dozens of man-made lakes, around 120 miles of road, more than 200 major buildings, and some 350 employees—was “to investigate to what extent poaching is used by terror organizations, including Al Qaeda, to fund their operations.”

That’s fine and well, according to Holman. But “if it is significant for members of Congress to travel to some area to see what’s going on, then those types of trips can be financed by the government.” That would eliminate any real or perceived appearance of “that sort of conflict of interest,” he said.

At least one of Bonner’s constituents seems to agree with Holman’s assessment. In the Alabama Media Group story, a commenter under the name Blake Kirk noted that, “when somebody just GIVES a Congresscritter something that you or I would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for, I have to wonder what they are getting back in return.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate