Congress
Meet the Senate aide with a $44,000 taxpayer-funded commute
The top aide to Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas charged $44,000 to taxpayers over the past two years in commuting expenses between Washington and Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lives, according to public records.
The reimbursements paid to Brent Robertson are legal and comply with congressional rules governing expense reimbursements, according to experts who reviewed his arrangement, but they also said it was highly unusual and at odds with the intent behind those rules. Typically senior congressional aides are stationed either in Washington or their employer’s home state.
Not so for Robertson, Marshall’s longtime chief of staff, who bought a home about 190 miles from Washington in March 2024.
Between April of that year and the following September, he took 11 trips labeled “Lynchburg VA to Washington DC and Return” and got $16,000 back in expenses from the government, according to Senate expense records. The expenses covered “incidentals,” “transportation” and a “per diem,” which is not usually taxed.
Between October of last year and this past March, Robertson took 15 trips with the same label and got an additional $28,000 in expenses back. He secured a per diem payment of $10,000 for one trip to D.C. between Jan. 14 and Jan. 23, coinciding with the presidential inauguration.
Stanley Brand, an attorney who served as House general counsel under Speaker Tip O’Neill, said it appeared to be “a big, wide loophole” and said he had “never” heard of a similar arrangement.
“What if everybody decided to do that, let their staff live far away from their location, and then just charge it off to the government?” Brand said after reviewing the arrangement at Blue Light News’s request.
Robertson declined to comment. Neither Marshall’s office or other experts, including a Senate Democratic aide familiar with official reimbursements, could point to another case where a senior congressional staffer lived outside the Washington area or their employer’s home state and expensed travel costs in this way.
Payton Fuller, a spokesperson for Marshall, said the senator is permitted under Senate rules to designate a remote duty station for his employees, which would allow them to expense work trips to Washington. Marshall’s office shared documentation showing Robertson changing his duty station to Lynchburg before charging the trip expenses.
“After a gang shooting struck his wife’s vehicle outside their D.C. condo, Brent and his family made the decision last year to move to Virginia,” Fuller said in a statement. “Like dozens of other chiefs of staff who have duty stations outside of D.C., and in full accordance and approval of Senate ethics, rules, and guidelines, Brent is reimbursed for official travel to and from his home and duty station in Virginia.”
She declined to comment when asked whether Robertson, who is separately on track to earn more than $220,000 in salary this year, intends to keep charging regular travel to and from his Virginia home to Marshall’s official expense account.
The Republican and Democratic spokespeople for the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which oversees the chamber’s personnel practices, declined to comment.
Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, interim vice president of policy and government affairs at the nonprofit watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, questioned the arrangement after being briefed on the expenses. Robertson’s use of official funds, he said in an interview, “appears as though it’s purely personal, which is not what those funds are supposed to be used for.”
Senate expense rules prohibit spending taxpayer funds for personal use, and Hedtler-Gaudette said the expenses “violate the spirit” of those guidelines. “It would be one thing if he was traveling to Kansas because that’s the state that his boss is the senator from,” he said.
He also raised the concern that arrangements like Robertson’s, that “stretch the definition of what a duty station is and encompass the personal home of every staffer,” could proliferate.
Robertson’s expenses were paid out of Marshall’s Official Personnel and Office Expense Account, a $4 million annual allowance that encompasses staff salaries, representational costs and other office expenses. Marshall has spoken out against federal employees doing remote work and sponsored legislation to curtail the practice.
“I want to make it clear, I’m against teleworking from home,” he said last year. “I’m just against it overall at the government level.”
Robertson’s decision to live in Lynchburg and seek travel expenses back and forth is further complicated by the fact that he continued to own a Washington condo that he claimed as his primary residence until it was sold in May, according to D.C. property tax records. Publicly available copies of his tax bill show that lowered his property tax bills by hundreds of dollars during the period he was claiming travel expenses to and from Lynchburg.
After Blue Light News inquired about Robertson claiming a “homestead” tax deduction, Fuller said a “delay in processing” led to the error and that the “issue has been resolved.” Robertson, she said, recently paid about $700 in back taxes and fees owed to the D.C. government.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats have submitted their latest proposal for pairing Department of Homeland Security funding with immigration enforcement policy changes.
“Democrats sent Republicans our counteroffer on legislation to reopen DHS, pay TSA workers, while at the same time rein in ICE with commonsense guardrails,” Schumer said, adding that the offer “contains some of the very same asks Democrats have been talking about now for months” on changes to immigration enforcement tactics.
Schumer met with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Wednesday to discuss the funding stalemate.
President Donald Trump called on Congress Wednesday to quickly extend a key surveillance program amid a Republican rebellion that is threatening to tank the effort ahead of an April 20 deadline.
“When used properly, [the program] is an effective tool to keep Americans safe,” Trump said in a Truth Social post Wednesday. “For these reasons, I have called for a clean 18-month extension.”
He emphasized that restrictions included in the last reauthorization of the Section 702 spy program should remain in place. Trump also argued that the ongoing war against Iran should lead Congress to act quickly given the program, which allows intelligence agencies to monitor communications abroad without a warrant, is “extremely important to our Military.”
“With the ongoing successful Military activities against the Terrorist Iranian Regime, it is more important than ever that we remain vigilant, PROTECT our Homeland, Troops, and Diplomats stationed abroad, and maintain our ability to quickly stop bad actors seeking to cause harm to our People and our Country,” Trump said.
Blue Light News previously reported that the White House had privately communicated Trump’s support for a straight extension to key congressional leaders.
Speaker Mike Johnson pushed House Republican hard-liners who want new restrictions against domestic surveillance to back the extension Trump wants, including in a closed-door House GOP meeting Wednesday morning. Several Republicans still raised concerns about the “clean” reauthorization plan, including Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia.
President Donald Trump maintained government documents relevant to his business interests after he left office, according to an internal memo from former special counsel Jack Smith’s office.
The memo, viewed by Blue Light News, was transmitted by the Justice Department to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees earlier this month. It was turned over in response to Republican-led probes into the investigations Smith led during the Biden administration surrounding Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office, as well as his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
“Process is very much ongoing but the FBI has already since found both — that classified documents were commingled with documents created after Trump left office and that there are classified documents that would be pertinent to certain business interests,” stated the memo, dated Jan. 13, 2023.
The second volume of Smith’s report on his team’s investigative findings, which centers around the classified documents case, is currently under a court-ordered seal. Democrats have been pushing for DOJ to release it in hopes that it could reveal damaging information about the president. New information about Trump’s conduct, unearthed in this memo, could only heighten the pressure on the administration to make the full report public.
It also could inform questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is due to invite Smith to testify in a public hearing on his Trump investigations in the coming months.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, alleged in a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi dated Tuesday that the memo suggests Trump “may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”
Raskin also alleged that the DOJ appeared to have violated the judicial order compelling the seal of the second volume of Smith’s report in handing over some materials to Congress, including grand jury material.
A Justice Department spokesperson, in a statement Wednesday, rejected Raskin’s claims and called his move a “political stunt.”
The spokesperson said that it was unsurprising that Smith’s “files contain salacious and untrue claims about President Trump,” and the files handed over to Congress did not violate the court order, nor did they disclose relevant grand jury material.
“We understand that Jamie Raskin, much like Jack Smith, is blinded by hatred of President Trump,” the spokesperson wrote. “However, he needs to get his facts straight — this Department of Justice is the most transparent in history in part because of our efforts to expose the weaponization of the Biden administration in full compliance with the law and the court.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, also in a statement maintained that Trump “did nothing wrong” and called Raskin’s actions “pathetic.”
A spokesperson for House Judiciary Democrats pointed to the irony in the Trump administration claiming to be “the most transparent in history” when it was refusing to release Smith’s findings.
“Another day, another manufactured outrage from the left,” a spokesperson for House Judiciary Republicans countered.
The 2023 memo transmitted to Congress also stated that Trump maintained documents that were so sensitive that only few had access to them beyond the president, and the fact that he had materials relevant to his business interests suggested “a motive for retaining them.”
“These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them,” Raskin wrote in his letter to Bondi. “It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them.”
Gregory Svirnovskiy contributed to this report.
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