MCCONNELL’S WIFE GAVE HIM A SPECIAL REELECTION PRESENT: $78 MILLION IN FEDERAL FUNDING

[CaptQuint]

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” 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.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06 ... o-kentucky

[CaptQuint]

Biker is a special Democrat, and when I say Democrat I mean GOP cum swallowing rube

[Antknot]

Yeah, because one just cannot accept that there are conservative Demorats

How long since you last drunk the cool-aid?

[beagleboy]

Per a poll last year, 12% of registered Democrats want abortion made completely illegal. 1 out of 4 is Pro Life.
Almost the same percentage of Republicans are pro choice.

Over 60% of Republicans believe in global warming.
6% of Democrats don't believe in global warming.

[CaptQuint]

How Did the Republican Party Get So Corrupt?

[Wut]

ZOMG!!! A pol bringing home the pork to his state/district??? That has never happened before!

IMPEACH!

So you're OK with this then.

[Reservoir Dog]

ZOMG!!! A pol bringing home the pork to his state/district??? That has never happened before!

IMPEACH!

So you're OK with this then.

No, but Im not a child and pretend that only one party does it. Its the norm in Congress

Yet the next time a Democrat gets caught doing it you'll be in here screaming about it from the rooftops.

[AnalHamster]

Yeah, because one just cannot accept that there are conservative Demorats

There are, you aren't one. It's really bizarre to me that you keep up this pretence, literally no one on the forum believes you and no one off the forum knows or cares, so what is the point?

[AnalHamster]

Yeah, because one just cannot accept that there are conservative Demorats

There are, you aren't one. It's really bizarre to me that you keep up this pretence, literally no one on the forum believes you and no one off the forum knows or cares, so what is the point?

Im pro-choice, pro-gun control, anti-death penalty, pro-gay rights, pro-weed, pro-defense cuts, and oh, I give to Dem candidates.......just what the fuck would you consider me?

A trump cuck who supports every talking point no matter what it is. You post every internet research agency meme and support every policy. I really don't care and nor does anyone else, it's just mystifying why you insist on keeping up this pretence. You're fooling precisely no one, and really no one gives a shit what you believe anyway. Why bother?

[Reservoir Dog]

ZOMG!!! A pol bringing home the pork to his state/district??? That has never happened before!

IMPEACH!

So you're OK with this then.

No, but Im not a child and pretend that only one party does it. Its the norm in Congress

Yet the next time a Democrat gets caught doing it you'll be in here screaming about it from the rooftops.

Nope, take that straw man elsewhere, cunty

You will. And you know it.

[CaptQuint]

[CaptQuint]

Kavanaugh defender Amy Chua's daughter gets Supreme Court job with Kavanaugh

Three days after President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh as his pick for the Supreme Court, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Amy Chua, a Yale Law professor better known as the author of the 2011 parenting memoir “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” who praised Kavanaugh as a mentor to young women.

Chua, a member of the school’s clerkships committee, had placed eight women with Kavanaugh, including her daughter Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, who had been accepted to serve with Kavanaugh, then a circuit court judge.

Some critics called the op-ed self-serving, arguing that Chua was simply setting her daughter up for a Supreme Court clerkship once Kavanaugh was confirmed.


In her op-ed, Chua preemptively denied the claim, saying her daughter would “probably” look for a different clerkship if Kavanaugh landed on the nation’s highest court. (In a tweet, Sophia, who graduated from Yale Law in 2018, said she was planning to join the Army and would not be “applying to SCOTUS anytime soon.“)

On Monday, the Supreme Court announced that Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld had been hired by Kavanaugh for a clerkship beginning in October.

Neither Chua nor her daughter responded to requests from Yahoo News for comment.

Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court in October following a bitterly divisive nomination fight that included allegations of misbehavior from multiple women, which he denied. During his confirmation hearing, Christine Blasey Ford testified that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her at a party when they were teenagers.

While the Senate weighed those allegations, the Guardian first reported that Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, advised female students that it was “not an accident” that Kavanaugh’s female law clerks all “looked like models” and to project a “model-like” femininity if they wanted to clerk for him.

Chua denied the allegations.

“For the more than ten years I’ve known him, Judge Kavanaugh’s first and only litmus test in hiring has been excellence,” she said in a subsequent statement. “As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, he has also been an exceptional mentor to his female clerks. Among my proudest moments as a parent was the day I learned our daughter would join those ranks.”

Rubenfeld himself was the subject of an internal investigation at Yale concerning allegations of inappropriate behavior with female students.

https://news.yahoo.com/kavanaugh-defend ... 10399.html

[Stapes]

I'd like to hire them for a "clerkship"

[CaptQuint]

While referencing infrastructure projects this past April, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a seemingly charming quip about his personal life. “My roommate has been involved in this issue for a couple of years,” he said, when asked about a potential funding package to overhaul the country’s crumbling roads and bridges. The “roommate” he’s referring to is, of course, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who also happens to be his wife.

Although this reference was intended as a joke in his April remarks, a recent Politico story casts the effect of their personal ties in a potentially more nefarious light.

The report, from Tucker Doherty and Tanya Snyder, notes that Chao has overseen the allocation of nearly $80 million in federal grants to Kentucky during her time as transportation secretary, designating a special intermediary to help the state navigate this funding process, a resource that few states have. It raises questions about whether Chao — who oversees funding for everything from highway construction to port development at the Department of Transportation — was treating Kentucky differently due to her relationship with McConnell.

DOT refuted such implications in the piece, though ethics experts note that Chao and McConnell’s relationship make such grant allocations — and concerns about if there was favoritism involved — especially murky.

What’s more, the concerns about Chao and ethical impropriety isn’t limited to these grants. Just last week, a New York Times story highlighted how Chao had attempted to include members of her family, who own a major shipping company, in meetings with Chinese officials that she was set to attend as a Cabinet secretary. Those meetings were ultimately canceled in the wake of concerns voiced by some US government officials, though another trip was scheduled at a later date.

While Donald Trump made “Drain the Swamp” one of his rallying mantras in 2016, many of the Cabinet officials he’s appointed have proven to be doing just the opposite.

According to ProPublica, at least 188 former lobbyists have been appointees in the Trump administration. Additionally, several Cabinet officials including former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, have been ousted for their attempts to use their power — and federal dollars — to secure everything from chartered flights to extensive security detail.

Now Chao is the latest administration official under scrutiny.

Ethical questions about McConnell, Chao, and Kentucky infrastructure grants, briefly explained
According to the Politico report, questions about ethical conflicts center on the number of grants DOT has approved for projects in Kentucky, many of which could benefit McConnell politically as he hits the campaign trail for his 2020 reelection bid in the southern state.

Chao has helped greenlight at least $78 million in grants for construction projects in Kentucky, Doherty and Snyder write. Additionally, she helped designate a special go-between that worked with McConnell’s office on Kentucky-related projects:

Chao’s aide Todd Inman, who stated in an email to McConnell’s Senate office that Chao had personally asked him to serve as an intermediary, helped advise the senator and local Kentucky officials on grants with special significance for McConnell — including a highway-improvement project in a McConnell political stronghold that had been twice rejected for previous grant applications.

Other states do not have access to such an intermediary, Politico noted, suggesting that Inman’s role may have helped advance priorities important to Kentucky that would also happen to be politically favorable to McConnell.

In response to the piece, McConnell argued in a statement to Politico that he saw his role as both a top Senate lawmaker and a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee helping raise Kentucky’s profile and garner benefits for his constituents. In that statement, however, he did not acknowledge his wife’s role as transportation secretary.

“Every single day, Kentuckians from across the Commonwealth contact me with their concerns,” McConnell said. “As Senate Majority Leader and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, I am able to ensure that these issues — both large and small — are part of the national discussion.”

Meanwhile, a representative from the Transportation Department told Politico that the grants that were allocated to projects in Kentucky, including $67 million to fix roads in Boone County, made up a small fraction of those that had been doled out during Chao’s time as secretary. According to the spokesperson, Kentucky had received just five of 169 grants that had been given to different states.

“This online post intentionally misleads readers, misrepresenting the grant application process and disregarding key facts,” a spokesperson for the DOT told the Hill.

Ethics experts say Chao and McConnell’s relationship makes these grants murkier
Ethics experts say that Chao and McConnell’s efforts on this subject don’t look great, but that more evidence would likely be needed to identify a definitive ethics violation.

“There’s nothing illegal about her steering those funds to her husband’s home state, and her home state, as long as things are aboveboard,” the Brookings Institution’s John Hudak explained to Politico. “The question, though, is how do you deal with conflicts of interests? And this is a clear conflict. ... Even if it’s not legally so, these are political offices, so the optics of this are important. In a business setting, you would put firewalls up to prevent those types of bad optics.”

“At this point, we don’t have enough information to say that it’s a criminal violation. It smells bad, but if and until we have more information, I would not be able to say that we’re looking at a slam-dunk,” George Washington University law lecturer Jessica Tillipman told Vox.

Tillipman added, however, that there are steps Chao could have taken to avoid this scrutiny — for example, consulting the independent ethics officials that each federal agency has who can vet various efforts for potential conflicts.

Walter Shaub, the former head of the Office of Government Ethics, was among those who had a much harsher take, however, suggesting that such activity could “lead to the impeachment of a corrupt official.”


Before any sort of definitive action like that could be taken, however, Tillipman noted that more evidence might be needed. The Trump administration, previously, has dragged its feet on offenses by other Cabinet-level officials and only acted when much of the information became overwhelming. “This administration has seemed to turn a blind eye to these allegations in the past, unless it’s become untenable like a Pruitt, [former Interior Secretary Ryan] Zinke, or Price,” she said.

The focus on Chao and McConnell’s relationship also comes as Democrats dial up their attention on political corruption, a cornerstone of their landmark HR 1 bill, which would give the Office of Government Ethics more enforcement capabilities. Democrats will likely hammer McConnell on ethics questions as 2020 approaches, though it’s unclear how much of an impact it would actually have on his candidacy given Kentucky’s strong Republican lean.

“It certainly can’t help him, and I’m certain his opponents will try to use it,” says Tillipman. Still, “it’s a really red state, so I think it’s a high hurdle,” she added.

https://www.vox.com/2019/6/11/18659681/ ... rce=reddit

[FSchmertz]

You can just HEAR that swamp a'drainin'