A new report says Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke sought to designate his wife, Lola, an agency volunteer in order to obtain free travel for her. | Win McNamee/Getty Images Energy & Environment Interior Dept. probe faults Zinke for travels with wife The report revealed that Interior spent $25,000 to send a security detail on vacation with Ryan and Lola Zinke when they traveled through Turkey last year.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke sought to skirt or alter department policies to justify his taxpayer-funded trips with his wife, the agency’s inspector general said in the latest critical report on travel practices by President Donald Trump's Cabinet members.

Zinke's maneuvers included pressing Interior staffers to research whether his wife, Lola, could become a volunteer at the agency, a move the employees said was designed to enable her to travel with him at taxpayer expense, according to a report obtained by POLITICO that the inspector general's office will release next week. It said he also violated Interior policy by have her travel with him in federal vehicles.


The report addresses several allegations of the Zinkes' travel practices, and it lands amid a controversy about an announced move to place a political appointee from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in charge of the Interior IG’s office. HUD Secretary Ben Carson announced the move in a staff email last week, but an Interior spokeswoman said Thursday that the news was "false information."

The report also revealed that Interior spent $25,000 to send a security detail on vacation with Ryan and Lola Zinke when they traveled through Turkey last year — a decision made by a U.S. Park Police supervisor worried about the couple’s safety.

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The IG report says Zinke often brought his wife on official trips and frequently reimbursed Interior for the costs. And while allowing a spouse to travel in federal vehicles violates the agency's policy, Interior Deputy Solicitor Edward Keable told the investigators that the restriction did not necessarily apply to the secretary.

“This was also the opinion of Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who said the policy applied to DOI employees but not necessarily to a Secretary,” the report continues. “He also said this was a policy a Secretary could change ‘with the stroke of a pen.’”

In the report, Zinke defended bringing his family along on travel, saying it had been cleared by ethics officials. An employee in the DOI solicitors office said she “routinely advised Secretary Zinke’s schedulers that it would be “cleanest” and “lowest risk” if Lola did not ride with him, but she also told schedulers that she could justify her riding in a government vehicle because Zinke could not use a personal vehicle for travel. She said that the schedulers and Zinke “want her in the car.”

“The Inspector General report proves what we have known all along: the secretary follows all relevant laws and regulations and that all of his travel was reviewed and approved by career ethics officials and solicitors prior to travel,” Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said in an email. “Additionally, the secretary received the same exact legal advice from the solicitors as previous secretaries and he acted consistently. The report even said so."

Zinke “said the policy and procedures that governed this had been longstanding in the Government and that he was allowed to have his wife, ‘direct family’ and any other guests accompany him in security detail vehicles as long as they went through the approval process,” the report says. “He said this was consistent with all Cabinet Secretaries and that his wife had never been in a security vehicle without him.”

Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee, who had requested the investigation, did not offer immediate comment on the report findings, but Zinke's environmental critics said the report should force him out.

“Being exposed for abusing his power to rip off the taxpayer while benefiting himself provides all the proof that should be needed to fire Ryan Zinke,” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement. “At the same time, Zinke appears to be partaking in a cover-up of his actions while pointing the finger at anyone but himself."

The Democrats had asked the inspector general for the investigation after reports in POLITICO and other news media detailed how Zinke — sometimes accompanied by his wife — used official, taxpayer-funded travel to meet with political backers. The IG in November said its original report was delayed because Zinke had not adequately documented his official travel.

Zinke had also come under fire for occasionally having his wife accompany him on official trips and her use of Interior staff to coordinate political and social events.

According to the latest report, Zinke was reportedly “upset” his wife had to pay her own travel expenses, so he sought to make his wife a “volunteer” at Interior so she could snag “free trips” at taxpayer expense, the inspector general found.

Interior ethics attorney Melinda Loftin relayed “concerns about the ethical nature” of that arrangement to Daniel Jorjani, the principal deputy solicitor, “but he continued to ‘pressure’ her about the issue.”

Loftin wasn’t alone in those worries, according to the report. Ed McDonnell, an alternate designated agency ethics official, voiced the same sentiment to Jorjani, saying it would be “wrong” to bestow volunteer status on Lola Zinke to legitimize travel with the secretary.

“We’re spending taxpayer dollars trying to figure out if she can be a volunteer so that he [Zinke] doesn’t have to pay [reimbursement for her riding in Government vehicles],” he said.

Zinke eventually explored making his wife the ombudsman for department veterans, noting he “probably” told Jorjani about the idea. The ethics office ultimately said making Lola Zinke a volunteer didn’t run afoul of the rules, but that “the optics were not good, so they decided against it,” according to the report. The secretary denied his motive was to avoid paying the government back for his wife’s trips.

Zinke also brought campaign contributors on official boat tour of the Channel Islands in California, the report found.

Zinke acknowledged two donors to his congressional campaign were invited to participate in the April 2017 tour on a National Park Service boat as “stakeholders,” but said he considered the fact that they’d held a fundraiser for him “immaterial.” The secretary said they were subject matter experts, though a senior Channel Islands employee present for the trip told investigators “it was never clear what purpose” their presence served.

Zinke told the investigators he was sure their presence had been shared with Ethics Office, but could not recall whether he personally informed anyone.

The report also said Zinke had his security detail drive a non-governmental employee to Ronald Reagan National Airport following a dinner in Washington, despite knowing beforehand they could not do so without him in the vehicle.

Allegations that Zinke attempted to secure a government phone for his wife, that he instructed employees to walk his dog and that he split orders of commemorative "challenge" coins to avoid issuing a competitive bid contract were unfounded, according to investigators.

The IG concluded that the agency made five orders for challenge coins, which generally bear an organization’s logo and are given as tokens of appreciation, at a cost of $13,576.50, but it switched companies for those orders because it was “unhappy with the quality of the coins.”

