Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00016925
US Politics
Conflict of Interest
All In The Family ... MCCONNELL’S WIFE GAVE HIM A SPECIAL REELECTION PRESENT: $78 MILLION IN FEDERAL FUNDING
Peter Burgess
Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chao arrive at the White House June 7 2011 in Washington DC. Guests arrived to attend a... BY BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/GETTY IMAGES.
Last month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stonewalled a plan to fix the nation‘s roads, bridges, mass transit, and other crumbling infrastructure, despite the urgency of the issue and the outline of the deal receiving rare support from both Democrats and the White House. But, as it turns out, McConnell isn’t opposed to all infrastructure spending. In fact, he’s quite open to it when it‘s flowing specifically to towns in his home state, thanks to a special arrangement with the Transportation Department set up by his Cabinet secretary wife.
Politico reports that Elaine Chao, spouse of Mitch, “designated a special liaison to help with grant applications and other priorities from her husband Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, paving the way for grants totaling at least $78 million for favored projects as McConnell prepared to campaign for reelection.” That liaison, Chao’s current chief of staff, Todd Inman, wrote in an email to McConnell’s office that Chao had “personally asked him to serve as an intermediary”—a benefit bestowed on no other state—and that he should be contacted if there were any “Ky-specific issue[s]” that should be flagged for the secretary’s attention. According to reporters Tucker Doherty and Tanya Synder, that included grants with special significance to the senator, such as a highway-improvement project that had twice been rejected.
Beginning in April 2017, Inman and Chao met annually with a delegation from Owensboro, Ky., a river port with long connections to McConnell, including a plaza named in his honor. At the meetings, according to participants, the secretary and the local officials discussed two projects of special importance to the river city of 59,809 people—a plan to upgrade road connections to a commercial riverport and a proposal to expedite reclassifying a local parkway as an Interstate spur, a move that could persuade private businesses to locate in Owensboro. Inman, himself a longtime Owensboro resident and onetime mayoral candidate who is now Chao’s chief of staff, followed up the 2017 meeting by emailing the riverport authority on how to improve its application. He also discussed the project by phone with Al Mattingly, the chief executive of Daviess County, which includes Owensboro, who suggested Inman was instrumental in the process.
“Todd probably smoothed the way, I mean, you know, used his influence,” Mattingly said in a Politico interview. “Everybody says that projects stand on their own merit, right? So if I’ve got 10 projects, and they’re all equal, where do you go to break the tie? Well, let’s put it this way: I only have her ear an hour when I go to visit her once a year,” he added of Chao and Inman, a longtime Bluegrass State operative who had worked as McConnell’s advance man. “With a local guy, he has her ear 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You tell me.”
At a news conference celebrating the grant, Owensboro Mayor Tom Watson told reporters the town was “thankful that we had such good associations built with Sen. McConnell and the U.S. Department of Transportation because without them it wouldn’t have happened.” Mattingly added, “We’re just really grateful and thankful to Sen. McConnell and Secretary Chao and our own Todd Inman.”
Boone County, another McConnell stronghold, also benefited from the direct line to Chao, via Inman. Inman reportedly communicated with the senator’s office concerning multiple requests from county executives to meet with the secretary, who sat down with Boone County Judge/Executive Gary Moore in December 2017, and whose request for a $67 million discretionary grant to upgrade roads in Boone County, was approved in June 2018.
Unsurprisingly, not everyone is thrilled by the special privileges that McConnell has enjoyed by virtue of his marriage. “Where a Cabinet secretary is doing things that are going to help her husband get reelected, that starts to rise to the level of feeling more like corruption to the average American…. I do think there are people who will see that as sort of ‘swamp behavior,’” John Hudak, a Brookings Institution scholar, told Politico. “There’s a standard for government employees; they’re expected to be impartial,” said Virginia Canter, a former White House associate counsel under Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and current ethics counsel for the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “When you have a spouse who’s the head of an agency and the other spouse is a leading member of Congress—and their office is referring matters to the department, and they’re flagging things from donors, from people with particular political affiliations, who are quote-unquote ‘friends’—it raises the question of whether the office, instead of being used purely for official purposes, is being used for political purposes. The fact that they’re both in these very important positions gives them the opportunity to be watching out for each other’s political and professional interests.”
Chao declined to comment to Politico. Inman said in a statement, “I’m proud to work for the Secretary and it’s an honor to work at the Department of Transportation, especially as this Administration is prioritizing infrastructure investments and meeting with people from all 50 states to discuss their needs. Our team of dedicated career staff does an outstanding job evaluating hundreds of applications for these highly competitive grant programs, a thorough process developed well before this Administration.”
McConnell is not the only one to benefit from Chao’s position in the Trump administration. Last week, the New York Times reported that the secretary tried to bring family members to government meetings with Chinese officials, despite said family members having major financial entanglements in China. Last month, the Wall Street Journal found that she’d made a $40,000 profit on her stake in Vulcan, the nation’s largest construction materials supplier, despite having promised—over a year ago!—to divest from the company, on whose board she sat.
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