The Intercept: “[Mike Rogers] is directing campaign funds toward chartered flights, a Miami car service, and BMW repairs.”

LANSING — As Michiganders struggled with skyrocketing costs, new reporting from The Intercept reveals Mike Rogers was spending nearly $100,000 in campaign funds on luxury travel, “accounting for the vast majority of the campaign’s travel expenses last quarter.” Rogers’ luxury travel splurge included more than $93,000 on at least five separate private jet flights, thousands of dollars spent at luxury hotels in Las Vegas and West Palm Beach, Florida, and thousands of dollars on BMW repairs and a Miami car service. 

Jeffrey Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, told The Intercept: “It seems like Mike Rogers has developed a real taste for the finer things. That means he is likely to want to continue to court, and be courted by, the economic elite, which portends badly for working class Michiganders who prefer their Senator have some understanding of their lives and identification with their interests.”

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The Intercept: Mike Rogers spent $100k on private jets and luxury travel last quarter

• Astronomical fuel prices driven ever-higher by the U.S.-Israel war in Iran might be hitting Mike Rogers, too. 

• The Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan spent more than $40,000 to cover a single private jet bill last month, according to campaign finance records reviewed by The Intercept. The five-figure ticket was part of over $100,000 worth of campaign cash Rogers spent on luxury travel last quarter, most of it on private jet trips.

• As economic woes shape the Michigan Senate race, Roger’s opponent, Democratic candidate and former public health official Abdul El-Sayed, has attacked the Republican repeatedly for his ties to corporations and billionaire donors. Rogers, who represented Michigan’s 8th District in the House from 2001 to 2015, regularly advocated in Congress to let lawmakers receive gifts and other benefits from restricted nonprofit groups. He helped defeat a 2006 bill that would have cracked down on former congressional members’ lobbying activities and banned certain privately funded trips.

• For Jeffrey Hauser, a critic of corporate political influence, Rogers’s newly revealed campaign spending on luxury services might spell a warning to Michigan voters feeling the crunch of a struggling economy.

• “It seems like Mike Rogers has developed a real taste for the finer things,” said Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, which is not backing any candidate in the Michigan race. “That means he is likely to want to continue to court, and be courted by, the economic elite, which portends badly for working class Michiganders who prefer their Senator have some understanding of their lives and identification with their interests.”

• In September, the Rogers campaign paid $93,152 to JL Jets for at least five separate private charter flights, including the $40,000 transaction. Around the same time, the campaign also dropped another $500 on the luxury chauffeur company Blacklane. From July to September, Rogers’s campaign paid an additional $4,527 to Blacklane for luxury car services, including a $2,078 chauffeur expense on August 17. The campaign spent $683 on a pair of limo rides in August and September.

• The Rogers campaign did book some flights with airlines like Frontier and Southwest, spending about $29,000 on 10 flights, but luxury transportation accounted for the vast majority of the campaign’s travel expenses last quarter.

• Among Rogers’s hotel spending was a $2,000 stay at The Breakers, a luxury oceanfront hotel in Palm Beach, Florida; another $1,295 at the Grand Traverse Resort and Spa in Michigan; and $200 at the five-star Palazzo at The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. In addition to travel costs, the campaign paid $2,165 to its deputy campaign manager Tyler Henningsen in late September for car repairs at a BMW dealership in Bloomfield Hills, one of Michigan’s most affluent areas. Henningsen did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, but the Rogers spokesperson said the car was used for campaign purposes

• Rogers holds significant personal investments in the real estate, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity industries. His Senate campaign has received significant backing from corporate figureheads such as billionaires, Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan, the DeVos family, and Elon Musk, who through his super PAC, America PAC, has poured into the race more than $6 million since Rogers promised to “shield” the world’s richest man from congressional oversight.

• While Rogers was in Congress, he chaired the House Intelligence Committee and was a key supporter of the Patriot Act, pushing to expand domestic spying powers. Toward the end of his time in Congress, in 2013 and 2014, he and his wife Kristi attended a pair of weekend retreats at a five-star resort, The Cloister in Sea Island, Georgia, on the dime of the right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute. At the 2014 forum, described in 2022 by CBS News as “a private, off-the-record gathering of conservative leaders and wealthy donors,” Rogers spoke as a panelist in his capacity as House Intelligence Committee chair on “cybersecurity and national security issues,” disclosure forms said. 

• Alongside Rogers, the 2014 event featured prominent conservative figures as speakers, such as then-House majority leader Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.; Iraq War architect Karl Rove; then-Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; New York Times columnist David Brooks; then-president of the National Economic Council Gene Sperling; and Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Also in attendance were Betsy and Dick DeVos, Donald Trump’s first-term education secretary and former Amway CEO, respectively, who have since funded Rogers’s current run and several past campaigns.

• A few weeks after the conservative retreat, Alexander stepped down as NSA director under the cloud of the Edward Snowden leaks revealing the U.S. government’s role in a global spying network. That year Alexander founded cybersecurity firm IronNet, which hired Rogers in 2015 after he decided not to run for reelection. He was later elevated to a board role at IronNet — which has since gone bankrupt — and received more than $700,000 in payments and held stock with the company worth $250,000 to $500,000, according to financial disclosure forms.

• “Politicians spend enormous amounts of time with the super rich, either because they are seeking to raise money from them, consulting with them about the economy, or both,” Hauser said. “As a result, they start to develop expensive tastes.”

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