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REPORT CITES MITCH MCCONNELL’S WIFE’S MISUSE OF TRANSPORT POST
- By The Financial District
- Mar 5, 2021
- 2 min read
The Transportation Department’s inspector general asked the Justice Department in December to consider a criminal investigation into what it said was Elaine Chao’s misuse of her office as transportation secretary in the Trump administration to help promote her family’s shipping business, which is run by her sister and has extensive business ties with China, Eric Lipton and Michael Forsythe reported for the New York Times.
In a report made public on Wednesday (Thursday, March 4, 2021, in Manila), the inspector general said the Justice Department’s criminal and public integrity divisions both declined to take up the matter in the closing weeks of the Trump administration, even after the inspector general found repeated examples of Ms. Chao using her staff and her office to help benefit her family and their business operations and revealed that staff members at the agency had raised ethics concerns.
“A formal investigation into potential misuses of position was warranted,” Mitch Behm, the department’s deputy inspector general, said on Tuesday in a letter to House lawmakers, accompanying a 44-page report detailing the investigation and the findings of wrongdoing.
The investigation of Ms. Chao came after a 2019 report in The New York Times that detailed Ms. Chao’s interactions with her family while serving as transportation secretary, including a trip she had planned to take to China in 2017 with her father and sister.
The inspector general’s report confirmed that planning for the trip, which was canceled, raised ethical concerns among other government officials. Ms. Chao declined to respond to questions from the inspector general and instead provided a memo that detailed the importance of promoting her family as part of her official duties.
The inspector general’s investigation detailed a series of instances where Ms. Chao directed her staff to spend federal government time and resources to help with matters related to the shipbuilding company and her father.
The Chao family company, Foremost Group, was responsible as of 2019 for a large portion of orders at one of China’s biggest state-funded shipyards, and has secured long-term charters with a Chinese state-owned steelmaker, The Times reported. Foremost’s ships carry bulk cargo such as iron ore and coal, focusing on shipping those commodities to China.
