Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign shelled out $2.6 million on private jet travel in the final, dying gasps of her presidential run — bringing her failed campaign’s total tally on the environmentally unfriendly mode of transportation to a staggering $12 million, records show.
As Harris’ team desperately shuttled across the nation to host rallies and coax voter turnout between Oct. 1 and Oct. 17, her campaign ponied up nearly $2.2 million to the south Florida-based company Private Jet Services Group, along with $430,000 to Arlington, Va.-based charter flight broker Advanced Aviation Team, according to Federal Election Commission data.
The reliance on private jets, which can be up to 14 times more polluting than commercial flights, flies in the face of her 2019 doom-saying that global warming is an “existential threat” to humanity, as well as calls on the campaign trail for Americans to reduce their carbon emissions to stop global warming.
“Kamala Harris and a lot of pro-climate leaders have a lot of hypocrisy with the words that they state and the realities they must think are real,” Benji Backer, founder and executive chairman of the American Conservation Coalition, told The Post
“We need sensible solutions on environment and climate issues, but we’re not going to get them when there’s so much hypocrisy coming from the elitists that everyone else needs to change their lives except for them.”
Private Jet Service Group claims its flights are all carbon-neutral through its “reforestation program” that sequesters jets’ carbon emissions. It is unclear whether Advanced Aviation offers a similar program or whether the Harris campaign purchased carbon offsets for their flights.
It’s possible Team Harris’ private air fare tab could soar even higher, as the last tranche of the campaign’s spending forms covering the final weeks of the presidential race are not yet public.
In recent days, the Harris campaign has been mocked and derided for wasting its $1 billion war chest with high-profile spending, including multimillion-dollar celebrity-studded events and a six-figure set design for her appearance on the podcast interview “Call Her Daddy.”
But The Post combed over the campaign’s most FEC filings and found the campaign also splurged on:
- $12,097 on food delivery from Uber Eats and DoorDash since July
- At least $12,081 on ice cream pints and parlors like Sweet Lucy’s Ice Cream and Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams after President Biden was booted from the top of the ticket.
- $6,000 for a “site fee” at the board game cafe Snakes and Lattes in Tempe, Ariz., where Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz made a campaign stop to press college students to turnout on Election Day.
- $62,772 in room and catering fees at the posh, five-star Hotel Du Pont in Wilmington, DE, when Biden still running for office. A luxury king-bed room complete with soaking tub currently runs $500 a night.
- $9,600 on food and drinks at Pebble Bar near Rockefeller Center, which counts celebs Pete Davidson, in March, also while Biden still the Dem presidential nominee.
“Nobody should be shocked that Kamala Harris is not being sworn in on Jan 20,” GOP consultant Erin Perrine said.
“Instead of getting the message out, they wanted to have a party. That’s not how it works.”
The campaign additionally forked over $5.6 million to 24 lefty groups — a number of them black or Latino advocacy groups, or based in swing states she ended up losing — to help push her agenda and rouse voters.
Four of the groups that benefited from the campaign’s largesse — Washington DC-based Voto Latino and Power Rising Action Fund, Brooklyn-based Make the Road Action Fund, and Hyattsville, MD-based CASA in Action — have also received a combined $8.4 million from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2017, records show.
Others included Al Sharpton’s nonprofit National Action Network, which received two payments totaling $500,000 from the campaign just weeks before Harris joined the civil rights leader on his MSNBC weekend show for a softball interview.
The biggest winner in campaign’s spending in the 2024 election cycle was Media Buying & Analytics LLC, which raked in over $281 million in ad buys and productions, according to campaign finance records. The firm is a front company for Canal Media Partners, which is headed by former Georgia Democratic Party chair Bobby Khan and has previously done work for Uber and the gun reform advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, the newsletter Sludge reported.
Despite the Harris campaign’s monstrous spending, which combined with aligned interest groups amounted to $1.6 billion, Trump made gains in every state of the union except for Washington since 2020 as he cruised to an election victory.
Team Harris, meanwhile, has found itself somehow saddled with $20 million in debt, outraging Dems who quickly descended into finger-pointing and are demanding accountability.
“You are looking at these seven-figure luxury costs and thinking ‘Couldn’t that have been deployed to reach guys who listen to podcasts to Hispanic men, or reaching suburban voters?’ And then you say, ‘Who is making that decision? It just doen’t make sense,’” Democratic strategist Jon Reinish said.
A spokesperson for the Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
