Trio logged more trips than reported

With all the attention being paid to congressional travel these days, Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, wants to make sure Utahns know he took two more privately funded trips than were reported in a national survey of congressional travel.

And Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, says two of his privatelyfunded trips also were not in his official travel file in the House Clerk's office, and so were not properly counted.

Ditto for three trips taken by Utah's third House member, Chris Cannon, R-Utah.

There appears to be some kind of problem in the current system of reporting privately funded congressional travel — made more apparent with the continuing media coverage of errors and/or sloppy reporting of high-profile U.S. House members like House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

"We don't know why (all) our reports on trips weren't in the congressman's (public) file," said Charles Isom, director of communications for Cannon.

Monday, the Deseret Morning News, using information provided by PoliticalMoneyLine.com (which in turned gleaned its information from publicly filed reports by U.S. House and Senate members), ran a story saying that since 2000 Matheson had gone on two privately funded trips: one to Germany in 2003, costing $3,564, paid for by the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress; and a second to Key Largo, Fla., in 2001, costing $2,834, paid for by the Democratic Leadership Council.

The paper said Bishop accompanied Matheson on the 2003 Germany trip ($3,646) as well as going to Baltimore for $883 in February 2005, and a second trip to Germany in March 2005, costing $4,960.

Cannon was down for five trips, one of those a three-day trip to Morelia, Mexico, paid for by a Latin studies group at the University of California at Berkeley. In total, the newspaper reported Cannon took trips valued at $5,859 since 2000.

But all three congressmen's travel picked up by private groups was actually thousands of dollars more for each man.

Matheson said he had reported a trip to the House Clerk's office, but somehow that original trip was not recorded properly, and so wasn't found by PoliticalMoneyLine.com. Bishop's office said two trips it properly filed weren't in his public file. While Cannon's office said two of Cannon's trips were filed, but were missing from the file Tuesday, while a third trip was a just-filed amendment to a previous report.