Rep. Gregory Meeks raked in thousands of travel miles last year, crisscrossing the globe in luxury trips to at least 16 countries — including some funded by taxpayers.
His 2014 travel schedule was so packed that the Queens Democrat flew to a different destination almost every month. Last summer, he trekked to Austria, Hungary, Israel, Kazakhstan and Russia over 10 days in August and September.
To unwind, Meeks, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, headed a few weeks later to the opulent Aria Resort in Las Vegas for a fund-raiser organized by his PAC.
With so much time on the road, some wonder if he has any time left to legislate.
“Congressman Meeks racks up more travel than most other members of Congress,” said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group. “Not only is he one of the most frequent foreign travelers, but he also has been at political fund-raisers from Las Vegas to the Virgin Islands. It’s a wonder he has any time to do work in his Queens district or Washington.”
Meeks has logged more travel since 2001 than any other Congress member from New York, according to a tally on the Web site LegiStorm.
It’s a wonder he has any time to do work in his Queens district or Washington
- Ken Boehm, government watchdog
Some of his 2014 trips are documented on his latest disclosures — which the Queens Democrat filed earlier this month, nearly two months late. He and a guest started off the year in Morocco on a week-long visit to the North African country, where he met with King Mohammed VI at his palace in Marrakesh.
In a YouTube video of the visit, Meeks and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus are seated on plush gilt-edged chairs surrounding the Moroccan king, amid the pop of photographers’ flashbulbs.
He also visited Rabat and Casablanca, but other details of the trip are sketchy. Foreign governments are not required to disclose the cost or an itinerary for the lawmaker junkets they finance.
Meeks came under fire for shady travel in 2013 when he and nine other federal lawmakers and 32 staff members accepted an all-expenses-paid trip to Azerbaijan. The sponsor was the Council of Turkic-American Associations, but the junket to Baku, where participants received rugs and other expensive gifts, was secretly funded by the country’s oil company, according to a classified report by the Office of Congressional Ethics recently obtained by The Washington Post.
Weeks later it was off to sunny Cartagena, a Colombian resort city, for a five-day jaunt financed by the Aspen Institute, a DC-based think tank, to study Latin American issues and meet with Colombian leaders. Reps met with academics and Latin American politicians in working lunches and breakfasts to discuss “challenges and opportunities for US policy in Latin America.”
He returned to the Caribbean in May on trips to Haiti and Cuba. His three-day visit to Cuba, where he toured the island in between talks with Cuban officials and a prison visit to Alan Gross, a US contractor accused of spying, cost the nonprofit group that financed the trip nearly $16,000, according to public records. Gross was released in December 2014 and relations with Cuba were re-established in July.
Meeks did not respond to e-mails seeking comment.