by David Corn at Mother Jones
Two months after Elaine Chao resigned as secretary of transportation, in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the Transportation Department responded to an October 2019 congressional request for an investigation of Chao, and forwarded to two House committees an inspector general report that identifies several areas where Chao apparently violated ethics rules. The report notes that in December 2020, the IG had “referred” its investigation to the Trump Justice Department and the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC, for possible criminal prosecution, and that both had declined to open an investigation.
In a press release accompanying the release of the IG report, the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and the Committee on Oversight and Reform listed four areas where Chao, who is married to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, seemingly “violated Federal ethics laws.”
- Chao tasked political appointees on her staff to contact the Department of Homeland Security regarding the status of a work permit application for a student studying at an American university who was a recipient of her family’s philanthropic foundation.
- Chao made extensive plans to include family members in events during a planned, but subsequently canceled, official trip to China in November 2017 that included intended stops at schools and other locations that had received support from her family’s international shipping business, the Foremost Group. In an email regarding a meeting with “top leaders” (presumably of the Chinese government), Chao instructed her staff to include her father, her sister, and her sister’s husband. Chao’s sister was head of the privately held shipping company founded by her father.
- Chao directed her public affairs staff to provide support to her father, particularly in the marketing of his personal biography. This included keeping a running list of the awards her father received and editing her father’s Wikipedia page. She also instructed her staffers to send a copy of her father’s book to the CEO of a major American corporation with a letter requesting that he write a foreword for the book.
- Secretary Chao used Transportation resources and staff for personal tasks, such as checking on repairs of an item at a store for her father and having her staffers send Christmas ornaments to her family.
Regarding the last item on the list, the IG report detailed one of the examples:…
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