Vermont Ethics Panel Clears Lawmakers Over Israel Trip

Vermont’s House Ethics Panel dismissed complaints Monday against five state legislators who accepted an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel worth $6,500 per person, ruling the government-sponsored visit didn’t cross the legal line under state ethics rules.

The five lawmakers cleared were Rep. Sarita Austin, D-Colchester; Rep. Matt Birong, D-Vergennes; Rep. Gina Galfetti, R-Barre Town; Rep. Will Greer, D-Bennington; and Rep. James Gregoire, R-Fairfield. All five traveled to Israel in September 2025 as part of a delegation that included 250 legislators drawn from all 50 states. Israel’s government organized and paid for the trip, billing it as the largest gathering of U.S. state legislators ever held there.

The complaints were filed by Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish activist organization that has opposed Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The group argued the trip amounted to illegal lobbying disguised as diplomatic travel, not a legitimate exchange that Vermont law permits public officials to accept.

The panel didn’t buy that argument.

Under the Vermont General Assembly’s ethics framework, gifts from foreign governments can be permissible if they qualify as a “cultural, political, or civic event.” The panel found that the flights, lodging, and other benefits the five lawmakers received fit that description and were reasonable under state law. The legal question wasn’t who paid. It’s whether what they received crossed a threshold the law actually prohibits.

Jewish Voice for Peace pressed a harder point about what happened during the visit itself. Israel’s foreign minister, according to the group’s complaint, urged the visiting legislators to pass laws in their home states restricting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, the international campaign that uses economic pressure to push Israel to change its policies toward Palestinians. That appeal, the activists argued, turned the whole trip into a lobbying operation.

The panel disagreed. According to reporting on the dismissal, published April 04, 2026, the panel found the foreign minister’s comments were “beyond the scope” of what could be attributed to the Vermont lawmakers, and that the five representatives didn’t know they’d face a specific legislative pitch before they boarded the plane.

The activists also pointed to what happened back in Montpelier after the legislators returned. Four of the five Vermont representatives named in the complaints sponsored a state bill that would create a new legal definition of “antisemitic harassment” in Vermont law. That definition would cover “negative references to Jewish customs or the right to self-determination in the Jewish people’s ancestral and indigenous homeland,” language that critics said was plainly directed at protecting Israel from political criticism. Jewish Voice for Peace said that bill was proof the trip produced the lobbying outcome Israel’s government wanted.

“The language in that bill didn’t come from nowhere,” a spokesperson for Jewish Voice for Peace said, describing the connection between the 2025 trip and the 2026 legislative push.

The panel’s proceedings are closed to the public, and the full record of evidence it reviewed isn’t public. The complaints were initially filed in 2023 and moved through the ethics process for roughly two years before the Monday dismissal. The five legislators haven’t faced any formal sanction.

Whether the bill those four lawmakers co-sponsored advances in the Vermont legislature is a separate question the ethics panel didn’t weigh. What the panel decided, narrowly, was that accepting $6,500 worth of Israeli government hospitality in September 2025 didn’t violate Vermont law. That finding stands.