[Malsua]

A person “requested” the mission.

That person had to have a lot more “juice” than Louis Caldera.

That person was probably a medium to low grade clerk that works in the office.

[Beckwith]

I can tell you never worked around the government bureaucracy.

The words, “initiator” , “requestor” and “approver” have very specific meanings.

In order to schedule this mission, there were probably a dozen, or more, “approvers as the "request" moved down and then back up the chain of command.”

Caldera had final “approval” of somebody’s “request.”

The point I'm making is that someone had enough juice to “request” a $350,000 flight mission.

How many people in the White House have $350,000 in their budget to spend on a joyride?

The key to understanding this fiasco is understanding how the budgets and the bureaucracy work.