Bill Clinton and Tony Blair

It used to be that San Diego County's most traveled congressional office belonged to Democrat Susan Davis, who over the years has run up an impressive string of tabs, picked up by special interests, to a long list of international destinations.

Darrell Issa

Lately, though, Republican Darrell Issa and staffers have been giving Davis a run for the freebies.

As previously reported here, Issa aide Ellen Dargie showed up in Seattle in March for an Internet Association–paid pitch by high-tech outfits, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others. The free tour was valued at $930, according to a congressional disclosure report.

Two months before that, Dargie appeared at the Consumer Electronics Association’s annual January blowout in Las Vegas, which covered the $1386 cost.

Dargie has recently returned from yet another trip courtesy of a big-money Washington think tank, this one a five-day tour of London, Brussels, and Berlin, paid for by an outfit called the Progressive Policy Institute. The total cost, including $1969 worth of travel, $677 in lodging, and $350 of food, was $2996.

According to its website, the institute is known as "Bill Clinton’s idea mill" and "the source for many of the 'New Democrat' innovations that figured prominently in national politics over the past two decades."

Will Marshall

Founder and president Will Marshall, a cofounder of the Democrat Leadership Council, has been "one of the chief intellectual architects of the movement to modernize progressive politics for the global age," the site says.

He was an early backer of the invasion of Iraq. Executive director Lindsay M. Lewis was the national finance director of the Democratic National Committee in 2005 and 2006, his biography says.

Money for the think tank has come from various corporate sources, including the foundations of Eli Lilly and AT&T, according to the website sourcewatch.org.

In an April 15 report of the Dargie trip posted online, Marshall said his institute "has long been a catalyst for transatlantic dialogue, going back to the Clinton-Blair 'Third Way' conversations we helped to launch in the 1990s. Over the last four years, our work in Europe has focused on reviving transatlantic economic cooperation, with a particular emphasis on the rise of data-driven innovation and growth."

Dargie hooked up with 11 other congressional staffers for the institute's Digital Trade Study Group at Washington's Dulles International Airport on Monday, April 6, the itinerary shows, heading to the group's first stop in London.

There, a "private meeting with Daniel Korski, Special Advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron" was on the bill, as well as a "dinner discussion with Policy Network," which bills itself as an ”international progressive think tank.”

Later in Berlin, added Marshall's account, "We paid a visit to the Federal Association of German Newspaper and Magazine Publishers, which has been battling tech companies, especially Google, over copyright and content issues. A lively debate ensued with Managing Director Christoph Fiedler and Christoph Keese, Vice President of the Axel Springer publishing empire."

According to Dargie's disclosure statement, the group's meetings also involved discussion of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a pending free-trade deal backed by big business but opposed by critics who say it would favor corporate over consumer interests.