Over his eight years in Congress, Rep. Paul Gosar has spent more of his taxpayer-funded office budget on travel than nearly every member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Among those not in party leadership, only Madeleine Bordallo, the now-former delegate from Guam, spent more than the $1.2 million Gosar, R-Ariz., has designated for travel since 2011.

The data comes from an Arizona Republic review of the 435-member House financial records.

The records don’t make clear where Gosar and his staff have gone over the past eight years. But his longstanding involvement with the Western Caucus, a conservative group with deep ties to the energy industry, suggest oil, gas and other extraction industries feature prominently in his travels.

The Arizona Republic began examining Gosar's records in March as part of a routine look at the Arizona delegation's congressional spending.

Officially, the travel records reviewed by The Republic identify only the vendor he pays for his travels: typically, Citibank.

There is no public record of where Gosar stays, although his lodging costs are noticeably higher than the typical House member’s.

Gosar declined to detail his travels but defended them as essential to serving his district.

"DC is not where you find solutions to challenges facing rural America," he said in a statement. "My staff and I make ourselves available to the people of Arizona's 33,000+ square mile Fourth District and are constantly traveling to meet with them and hear about their priorities, which is why travel is one of my top expenses."

A Republic review of years of Gosar’s social media posts and official statements from his office helps fill in some of the blanks. He’s stood next to an oil pipeline in Alaska and sat alongside Capitol Hill colleagues such as U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, at a March retreat in Houston supported in part by the oil and gas industry.

Gosar’s travel is already getting more scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

He reported to the U.S. House clerk that a privately funded trip to London last summer included a dinner with members of the United Kingdom’s parliament.

That appears incorrect in light of documentary footage of him dining with Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former political adviser, and several far-right figures in European politics at the time he said he was with British lawmakers.

In the past, he has railed against wasteful spending on Capitol Hill. In 2014, he sought to bar first-class travel by his colleagues.

"As with all federal spending, Member's Representational Allowance funds are taxpayer dollars," he and two other congressmen wrote. "As such, the use of these finds must be exercised with the utmost efficiency and transparency."

Who is Paul Gosar?

Gosar, a dentist and conservative provocateur, represents Arizona's Prescott-based 4th Congressional District, the 24th-largest district in the country by land area. It covers northwestern Arizona and wraps around the Phoenix area.

To many, Gosar is perhaps best known as a source of outrageous claims and a supporter of controversial causes.

He has passed little legislation of his own: Three of the five bills he wrote that became law renamed buildings in Arizona. Gosar has had bills incorporated in broader legislation that became law, including five bills included in a sweeping public lands law signed by President Donald Trump this year.

In his fifth term, Gosar is the top Republican on the House subcommittee that oversees energy production, including mining on federal lands, but it comes at a time when his party lost its majority.

Since January 2017, he has served as the chairman of the Congressional Western Caucus, a group comprised mostly of House Republicans from Western states. All four of Arizona's Republican House members are part of the caucus.

Much of Gosar's travel appears linked to that group, taking him to states such as Minnesota and Montana. Even so, his office-paid travel expenses stand above those of most other members of the group.

What is typical travel spending?

Travel for House members typically is between 4 and 5 percent of their taxpayer-funded office budgets and varies widely by geography. Gosar's travel expenses represented more than 12 percent of his overall spending, according to House budget records.

Gosar's district isn't the biggest in Arizona. That honor goes to the 1st Congressional District represented by Rep. Tom O'Halleran, a Democrat. It spans northeastern Arizona and runs down to the outskirts of Tucson.

A few House districts encompass entire states, including Montana and Alaska. The largest state by far, Alaska, is 17 times larger than Gosar's district.

Gosar's expenses are nearly double the next-closest Arizona total, $688,000, for Rep. David Schweikert, a Republican who also went to Washington after the 2010 elections.

The travel spending comes from Gosar's overall office budget and at the expense of other items.

By far, the biggest expense for Gosar and other members of Congress is personnel compensation. An analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service found that about 75 percent of members' budget goes to their employees. For Gosar, 69 percent went to his staffers. That's the lowest share of any Arizona House member in the same span except former Rep. Ben Quayle, R-Ariz., who served only one term.

Gosar was among the House's biggest spenders on travel long before he headed the Western Caucus.

In 2012, his second year in Washington, Gosar ranked No. 2 for travel costs paid from office budgets, behind only Bordallo. It was the beginning of seven straight years in which Gosar placed in the top four in such travel costs, according to House budget records.

A low-profile caucus focused on energy issues

The Western Caucus is a relatively low-profile group in Washington, lacking the prominence of, for example, the conservative Freedom Caucus, which also includes all four of Arizona's GOP members. It isn't as well known as other groups, such as the Congressional Black Caucus, which is largely a Democratic group.

Members of the Western Caucus drew some of their greatest attention earlier this year by ridiculing other energy plans. They ripped the Democrats' Green New Deal ideas, which are intended to bring down the carbon emissions that contribute to climate change in part by redirecting government resources and offering new mandates.

At a news conference earlier this year, Gosar gulped a glass of milk, which he claimed would be harder to come by if the Green New Deal limited cattle grazing.

It made for good political theater.

In his review of how the Western Caucus fared in the 115th Congress that ended at the beginning of the year, Gosar touted the fact that the group's Twitter following had grown to 3,500 from 2,700 in two years. It currently stands at about 4,000.

By comparison, the Freedom Caucus has 50,000 followers and the CBC has 92,000.

The Western Caucus has a related nonprofit, the Western Caucus Foundation, whose priority is promoting access to energy resources. It is operated by lobbyists and advocates for energy and extraction companies with business interests pending in Washington, based on the roster of officers from the organization's most recent tax statement.

Darrell Henry, a former lobbyist for the American Gas Association, which advocates for natural gas, was listed as the executive director of the foundation.

Its director was identified as Shawn Whitman, a lobbyist with FMC Corp., a chemical company that has federally monitored pollution-cleanup sites in Washington state, Idaho, Minnesota and New York.

Pete Obermueller, president of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, was listed as the foundation's secretary.

The foundation's Facebook account spotlights congressional criticism of energy-related issues such as the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Travel costs have varied for others who have chaired the Western Caucus.

Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, led it in 2009 and 2010. He was not in the top 10 either of those years for travel spending. Neither was former Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., when she headed it in 2015 and 2016.

Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., headed the group from 2011 through 2014. Pearce ranks behind Gosar for the most travel spending by a member of the House during Gosar's tenure.

Hints of Gosar's travels

House member office budget records only sketch out the amounts spent on various items. Travel records don't specify where members traveled or stayed or even when they went, making it difficult to measure the value for their constituents.

Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of Open the Books, a nonpartisan government watchdog, said the lack of transparency is regular business in Washington.

"The way the House discloses office allotments tends to raise more questions than it answers. Members of Congress — and taxpayers — would be better off providing a much more detailed description of their spending in user-friendly formats," he said.

Scouring Gosar's social media posts only hints at some of the places he's gone. Among his hundreds of Facebook posts, for example, only a smattering of entries clearly came from his travels.

In an August post, there is a collage of pictures and video taken during a trip, apparently including a manufacturer in Montana and a stop at Old Faithful at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

In 2017, Gosar spent part of the August congressional recess in Alaska inspecting the oil pipeline. "Thanks BP!" Gosar noted in a Facebook post of his visit.

The warm feelings may be mutual.

Gosar voted for corporate tax cuts passed in December 2017 that included a provision allowing oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a long-sought goal of the British multinational oil and gas company.

In June 2017, Gosar was part of a Western Caucus contingent that traveled to Minnesota's Iron Range, an iron ore-rich area newly brimming again with mining business.

Gosar said on Facebook he went there "to see the overreach of the federal government on local mining firsthand. The power should belong to the state and to the people."

The Twitter account used to communicate as a member of Congress largely mirrors his Facebook posts.

Lodging expenses above the norm

Gosar's office budget spending records indicate that he spends a disproportionate share of his travel budget on lodging costs, The Republic's analysis found.

In the 115th Congress that convened in 2017 and 2018, Gosar spent $112,000, or 28 percent, of all his travel expenses on lodging. All the other House members spent 16 percent of travel expenses on lodging.

In the 114th Congress two years earlier, Gosar spent $105,000 on lodging, or 31 percent of his overall travel expenses. For other members, lodging represented 11 percent of their travel budget.

Privately funded travel

Apart from the trips Gosar has taken at taxpayer expense, he or his staff members have taken at least 33 trips worth $62,000 paid for by private interests, according to figures tracked by LegiStorm, a nonpartisan organization that monitors congressional reports.

One of them was Gosar's trip last year to London, paid for by the Middle East Forum. In 2016, he went to Tampa and Havana, Cuba, at the expense of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, which promotes engagement with Cuba.

About half of Gosar's privately funded trips involved his longtime chief of staff, Tom Van Flein.

Van Flein made two trips to Turkey, one in an effort to locate Kayla Mueller, the Prescott woman kidnapped by ISIS who died in the terrorist group's custody in Syria in February 2015. His second trip to Turkey came a month after Mueller's death.

Two California-based affiliated nonprofits, the Pacifica Institute and the West America Turkic Council, paid for the trips, which cost $6,700.

Van Flein also traveled to Paris twice for the Organization of Iranian American Communities, a nonprofit that advocates regime change of the Iranian government. That group has ties to the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a Paris-based, would-be government-in-exile that the U.S. government considered a terrorist organization from 2003 until 2012.

He also went to Germany at the expense of the Robert Bosch Foundation, which owns a controlling interest in the world's largest auto supplier, and to Israel via an arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbying group.

Gosar has repeatedly appeared at functions paid for by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which views him as one of its favorite members of Congress.

He has sent his staff to a dozen events with the Congressional Institute, a nonprofit that draws on support from lobbyists and holds annual retreats for Republicans.

Overseas travel

Members of Congress are required to document their official foreign travels. Gosar has visited at least 15 countries or city-states as part of four such trips, according to the congressional record.

That's not even close to the most since 2011. That honor appears to go to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who has taken dozens of foreign trips in that time. And among Arizona's House members, Schweikert has taken the most trips, eight.

In 2017, Gosar took two trips. On one, he traveled to Germany, Lithuania and Norway. In the other, he visited Vietnam, Singapore and Hong Kong.

His trip to the Far East cost more than $20,000, of which nearly $18,000 was identified as commercial airfare.

A similar itinerary from Washington to Vietnam, Singapore and Hong Kong and back would have cost about $4,300 on short notice on a popular travel website in April. Gosar was the only person identified on that official trip.

Republic data reporter Justin Price contributed to this report.

Reach the reporter Ronald J. Hansen at ronald.hansen@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4493. Follow him on Twitter @ronaldjhansen.

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