The report, by the department’s inspector general, examined travel expenses for all 208 people who served as a United States attorney from 2007 to 2009. It spoke of five who “exhibited a noteworthy pattern of exceeding the government rate and whose travel documentation provided insufficient, inaccurate or no justification for the higher lodging rates.”
While the report did not identify any prosecutors by name, the travel patterns of an official called “U.S. Attorney C” — the one “who most often exceeded the government rate without adequate justification” in terms of percentage of travel — match records about Mr. Christie that were released in the 2009 campaign for governor by his Democratic opponent, the incumbent, Jon S. Corzine.
As governor, Mr. Christie, who was the United States attorney for New Jersey from 2002 to 2008, has pushed to cut government spending and waste, making him a rising star in the Republican Party.
The report cited stays in the $449-per-night Nine Zero Hotel in Boston and the $475-per-night Four Seasons Hotel in Washington. Both cost more than double the government rate for those cities. In all, Mr. Christie exceeded the lodging rate on 14 of 23 trips without adequate justification, billing taxpayers $2,176 in excess of the maximum normal rates.
A spokesman for Mr. Christie declined to comment on the report but pointed to several statements Mr. Christie made about his travel costs during the campaign.
“I had to go someplace for part of my job. We tried to get the government rate. We couldn’t. So my only alternative would have been to not go,” Mr. Christie said at a campaign stop at a diner in October 2009, according to a report by The Associated Press.
Mr. Christie declined to speak with the inspector general’s investigators. But his secretary at the federal prosecutors’ office told them that he would choose his hotel if he was familiar with the city. If he was not, she would seek a recommendation for a “decent” hotel at or near the site of a scheduled meeting. While she “routinely called hotels to seek the government rate,” when the cost exceeded that rate he would obtain a waiver, according to the report.
In several cases, the waiver documentation included a memorandum signed by Mr. Christie saying that a room within the government rate was unavailable. The secretary said the memorandums meant not that a cheaper hotel room could not be found, but that no such rooms fit the criteria of a “decent” hotel near a meeting site.
The report also noted the reimbursements Mr. Christie received for airport transportation costs. Rather than taking a taxi for the four-mile trip between his hotel and the Boston airport, he took a car service costing $236. A similar arrangement for a London trip cost $562.
Calling for a tightening of rules for waivers on lodging rates, the inspector general’s report also criticized some other unnamed former prosecutors.
Another United States attorney, for example, billed taxpayers for three weekend hotel stays at a city in his district, ostensibly to attend meetings booked there on Fridays and Mondays.
But he acknowledged that “at least some and possibly all of these weekend trips coincided with his son’s baseball tournaments, which were held in the same city as the satellite office.” Moreover, the hotel rooms cost two to three times the government rate.
The report concluded that “there was no justification for the U.S. attorney to be reimbursed for these weekend trips.”
