DANGER ZONE
Trump Ally Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University Has Pentagon Contracts
Falwell has used Liberty-owned Freedom Aviation for personal, business, and political travel. Now it’s selling jet fuel to the Pentagon.
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This story has been updated to correct inaccurate information provided by the Defense Department and with comments from both the Pentagon and Liberty University.
Just months after President Donald Trump took office, the federal government re-upped a contract to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jet fuel from a university run by one of the president’s top political supporters.
The Pentagon’s energy procurement arm inked the deal, worth nearly $900,000, with a company called Freedom Aviation on May 9, 2017, and has purchased more than $400,000 in turbine fuel from the company since then. Freedom Aviation is wholly owned by Liberty University, a conservative school in Lynchburg, Virginia, led by high-profile Trump supporter Jerry Falwell Jr.