The Department of Transportation’s Inspector General just released a report citing Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao for misusing government resources to advance her family’s business concerns.
Chao, of course, wasn’t just a member of Trump’s cabinet. She’s also the wife of GOP Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell.
Among a number of other troubling improprieties, the report cites Chao for:
- Using her staff “to contact the Department of Homeland Security about the status of a work permit application[…] for a foreign student who was a recipient of Chao family philanthropy.”
- “Including family members and personal events in [her] planned, but subsequently canceled, trip to China in November 2017.”
- Providing her father, wealthy Chinese businessman James Chao, with “DOT Public Affairs and media support.”
That last item should be of particular concern.
As investigative journalist Peter Schweizer reported in January, it turns out that the McConnell’s have some very disturbing ties to the Chinese Communist Party through her father James.
.@peterschweizer breaks down the ties between Senator Mitch McConnell and China#NextRevFNC pic.twitter.com/rFRxMw02LF
— The Next Revolution (@NextRevFNC) January 18, 2021
Really, it goes to the fact that Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chao, his wife, are financially tied to the Chinese government. And it comes through the shipbuilding company that Elaine Chao’s family owns. That relationship was forged in December of 1993 when James Chao, Elaine Chao’s father, Elaine Chao, and the new son-in-law, Senator Mitch McConnell, visited Beijing, China, at the invitation of the China State Shipbuilding corporation. This was a coup to Beijing because Tiananmen square had happened just four years earlier. Very few high officials went there. The result of that meeting and the deals that followed is that today the Chinese government finances the construction of the ships for the shipbuilding company, they build the ships, they provide the crews for the ship, and they provide the cargo for the ship. So, the Chinese government could pull the plug tomorrow on this business. And the reason they’re doing business with them, let’s make it clear, is because Mitch McConnell is a very powerful figure in Washington, D.C. And the problem is, Steve, that his position on China has softened over the years the closer that this commercial relationship has become, and he’s a direct beneficiary of what this business does.
Moreover, Schweizer’s January report is just the tip of the iceberg regarding Mitch McConnell’s entanglement with a hostile foreign power.
In his 2018 book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Schweizer exposed an alarmingly large number of other tight connections the McConnell family has to the Chinese Communist Party.
- McConnell’s sister-in-law, Angela Chao, is on the board of directors of the Chinese Communist government-controlled Bank of China.
- McConnell and Chao have received somewhere between $5 million and $25 million from her father, James Chao. The elder Chao’s shipping firm, Foremost Group, rakes in a fortune through lucrative business deals with the Chinese government.
- During Elaine Chao’s tenure as transportation secretary, her father’s firm purchased 10 enormous cargo ships from a Chicom-controlled ship-building firm, China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC). That amounts to a 40% increase in the Foremost Group’s cargo capacity.
- But what’s worse is that both Chao’s father and her sister Angela have sat on CSSC’s board of directors!
- As confirmed by Politico Mitch McConnell’s father-in-law also appeared in “at least a dozen interviews with Chinese and Chinese-American media outlets” his wife was Trump’s transportation secretary. And, almost unbelievably:
In many of the videos, James Chao is introduced as founder and chairman of the Foremost Group shipping company, and, in discussing a 2016 biography about his life, speaks proudly of his daughter’s role as secretary of transportation, as she sits beaming by his side. One [now deleted] interview with New China Press published on April 12, 2017, features the pair sitting in what appears to be the Department of Transportation, with DOT flags in view behind the interviewer
Furthermore, New York Magazine reports that:
[I]n many of the videos James Chao brags about his daughter’s government work and contacts. In one video he describes talking with Trump on Air Force One. “The president spent several minutes with me,” he said. “We were talking about business.”
The Inspector general’s report that Elaine Chao used U.S. government resources to handle purely private matters relating to China—including putting federal employees at the disposal of her father James—ought to give new life to Schweizer’s shocking allegations.
As Breitbart reported way back in 2018, every single one has been confirmed by at least one major mainstream media outlet.
However, the media could have ended Mitch McConnell’s political career years ago had they chosen to give his troubling family and financial ties to China the same kind of blanket coverage they routinely devoted to unsubstantiated rumors and other, by comparison, less than trivial matters concerning Donald Trump.
Heck, McConnell probably would have been finished had CNN and the rest given any of this stuff the same level of attention they gave to Trump’s eating a second scoop of ice cream for dessert.
I wonder why they didn’t bother?