When the House Passed 'Build Back Better' Ted Lieu maskless while Boarding Cruise in NYC

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As we exclusively reported Friday night, Rep. Ted Lieu, who constantly berates those who aren’t following “the science” and is in favor of every totalitarian mandate and lockdown California “public health” officials promulgate, took his elderly parents on a cruise to Bermuda for Thanksgiving, then traveled to Hawaii for Christmas, and went to an NFL game at Los Angeles’ Sofi Stadium *maskless* with his wife and brother in October. Yet, he filed a “proxy letter” with the Clerk of the House of Representatives for the week of January 10, stating that he couldn’t travel to Washington DC due to the “ongoing public health emergency.”

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That’s right. The “ongoing public health emergency” prevented him from traveling to do his taxpayer-funded job, but it didn’t prevent him from flying to New York City, traveling from the airport to the cruise terminal, and then sailing to Bermuda on a floating petri dish with his 80-year-old mother and 77-year-old father, and it didn’t prevent him from going to a professional sporting event with 70,237 other people – while maskless.

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While Lieu was traveling by airplane for luxurious family vacations, we know from his numerous proxy letters he wasn’t traveling to his job in Washington, DC much last fall. You wouldn’t know that by looking at Lieu’s campaign account, though, since he spent quite a bit on airplane tickets in 2021 – far more than he did in 2020 – including some odd expenditures around the time that the cruise likely would have been booked. (While the government pays for a lot of Congressional travel to/from DC, Members also use campaign funds for that travel.) In fact, in 2020, from the time shutdowns really started (3/15) through the end of that year, Lieu’s campaign spent less than $2,000 on airfare – even though it was an election year. In 2021, though, Lieu’s campaign spent more than $20,000 on airfare just in the first nine months of the year, and $8,600 of that was spent on one day – August 3, 2021. In light of Lieu’s apparent reluctance to travel because of the pandemic and the fact that it wasn’t really a busy time in terms of campaign activity, that level of spending really sticks out.

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But, hypothetically speaking, flying six people (i.e., Mrs. Lieu and the two children, Ted’s parents, and Ted’s brother) from California to New York, roundtrip, around Thanksgiving for the family cruise could get a little pricey – and the time frames line up.

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