Talk about media bias: Trump White House has authorized fewer trips on military planes for senior officials than the Obama administration


According to statistics provided by a senior administration official, the Trump White House has authorized fewer trips on military planes for senior officials than the Obama administration did during the first eight months in office.
“If you look at the Obama administration, and you take a look at the amount of time that they spent in the air, they spent a lot of time in the air,” Trump said Friday, before Price's resignation.
From Jan. 20 to Sept. 19, the Trump administration authorized 77 military flights, while the Obama administration allowed 94 flights during the same time period, according to the stats. 
Leon Panetta, who served as both CIA director and defense secretary during the Obama years, frequently used a government airplane to commute back and forth from Washington to California nearly every weekend at taxpayer expense.
The Washington Times reported then that each flight cost about $32,000 but Panetta only had to pay $630 per trip, because that was the cost of an equivalent round-trip commercial flight. It noted that the government required defense secretaries to use a military plane for travel, and Panetta had the approval of Obama to fly home every weekend.
“The White House understood when Mr. Panetta took the job that he would return to Monterey to visit his family, as he did when he was director of the CIA,” a senior Obama administration official told the newspaper at the time. “That’s where his family lives, after all.”
Perhaps the most famous example of an Obama official using a non-commercial plane came when then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with former President Bill Clinton on June 27, 2016 at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport during the presidential election. 
The 45-minute encounter on her plane stirred up controversy because the FBI was still investigating Hillary Clinton emails during her tenure as secretary of state.
“I do regret sitting down and having a conversation with him because it did give people concern,” Lynch later said of the tarmac meeting in a television interview.
Fox News’ John Roberts contributed to this report.

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