Sen. Clair McCaskill has some expensive plane trips

Sen. Clair McCaskill apparently made mistakes in her previous FEC filing that omitted almost $300,000 in donations and expenditures. One thing in a Politico article that caught my eye was the very high prices she paid for what were fairly short plane trips. If these trips are on her own plane, the question is whether she is paying so much that she is actually using the campaign donations to make a profit on each plane trip. She has argued that overall she hasn't made real money from the plane, but that isn't really the relevant question. Possibly she would have lost a lot of money if she hadn't used the campaign to funnel money to herself through the plane. The $3,460 round trip within Missouri is pretty amazingly high.

The amendments accounted for a $1,395 roundtrip flight from St. Louis to Kansas City on Dec. 15, 2008; an $1,809 roundtrip flight from St. Louis to Chicago on Nov. 1, 2009; and $3,460 for a plane trip from St. Louis to Kansas City to Springfield, Mo., and back to St. Louis in April 2010. However, $912 of that third trip was for official Senate business. . . .