Elaine Chao favored Kentuckians in meeting with officials seeking grants

[UpInArms]

Source: Politico

In her first 14 months as Transportation secretary, Elaine Chao met with officials from Kentucky, which her husband Mitch McConnell represents in the Senate, vastly more often than those from any other state.

In all, 25 percent of Chao’s scheduled meetings with local officials of any state from January 2017 to March 2018 were with Kentuckians, who make up only about 1.3 percent of the U.S. population. The next closest were Indiana and Georgia, with 6 percent of meetings each, according to Chao’s calendar records, the only ones that have been made public.

At least five of Chao’s 18 meetings with local Kentuckians were requested in emails from McConnell staffers, who alerted Chao’s staffers which of the officials were “friends” or “loyal supporters,” according to records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The emails from McConnell’s office to Chao’s staff sometimes included details about projects that participants wanted to discuss with the secretary, or to ask her for special favors. Some of the officials who met with Chao had active grant applications before the Department of Transportation through competitive programs and the emails indicate that the meetings sometimes involved the exchange of information about grants and opportunities for the officials to plead their case directly before Chao.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2019/10/07/elaine-chao-kentucky-officials-grants-028412

[dlk]

1. Chao is dirty and corrupt

Scratch the surface of her family’s maritime business and it becomes very obvious.

[IronLionZion]

2. Corruption is a requirement to work in the Trump administration

They all do it so brazenly and seem to be proud of it

[malthaussen]

3. I live in Kentucky

I can assure you that none of the rewards of corruption have trickled down.

-- Mal

[MFGsunny]

4. Cho and Moscow Mitch are both bags of filthy dirty laundry. Period.

As a nation, we need to wash, rinse, repeat ourselves from all the MF45 sh*t stains.

[duforsure]

5. Grants for favors?

Sounds corrupt to me, and Moscow Mitch is involved with Russian corruption .

[Kid Berwyn]

6. It really is a small world.

From Slate:

First, at the end of May, the Wall Street Journal published a report that Chao had failed to divest her shares in a crushed stone, sand, and gravel company, which supplied construction materials to the transportation sector, a year after she had promised to do so. In the meantime, she had netted more than $40,000. (She has reportedly divested since the report came out.)

A few days later, in early June, the New York Times published a 5,500-word feature on her family’s shipping company, its deep ties to the government of China, the money it has provided Chao and her husband and his campaigns, and Chao’s apparent efforts to use her positions to bolster the business. Among the highlights of that piece: Chao repeatedly sought to include family members and relatives affiliated with the company in meetings with top Chinese officials during overseas trips (this was reportedly stymied by State Department officials); in a response to a Senate confirmation questionnaire, Chao failed to list multiple honorary awards, titles, and appointments she had received in China; her agency has proposed U.S. maritime program budget cuts that would hurt competitors of her family’s business; she took at least 21 meetings or interviews with Chinese-language media in her first year in office, including multiple appearances with her father, the company’s former chairman; she attended an event celebrating a company deal that involved transit projects that fell under her oversight; she did not recuse herself from any decisions affecting the shipping industry. The Times also reported that 13 members of Chao’s family had given $1.1 million to McConnell’s campaigns and political action committees tied to him between 1989 and 2018. The paper noted that Chao’s father had given the couple a gift of between $5 million and $25 million in 2008 that catapulted McConnell to become the 10th wealthiest senator.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/elaine-chao-trump-corruption-still-happening.html