Breach of Trust

Steal a little and they throw you in jail,

Steal a lot and they make you king.

— Bob Dylan

Shoplift a package of pencil liners, it's theft; take $600 million home from the office, it's breach of trust.

Elaine Chao, Donald Trump's Secretary of Transportation and Mitch McConnell's wife, took that amount home while in office, and hardly anyone batted an eyelash.

Chao exploited her cabinet position to double the worth of her family's shipping business, from $600 million to $1.2 billion (that's half a million dollars for each day in office).

She did so primarily by using the Transportation Department to promote the firm, encouraging international shippers to choose it over competitors.

Among other things, Chao took the company's chairman—her father—on 14 overseas junkets, all at taxpayers' expense. 

While on these trips, Chao would use her staff as personal assistants, not only for herself, but her father. She would also tap her pubic affairs office to promote daddy to the local media.

Whenever Chao spoke at a maritime conference—which she did, a lot—she'd strong-arm the sponsor to give her father an award at the event, and to buy a copy of Fearless Against the Wind for every attendee. The book was a syrupy biography of her father, ghostwritten by Chao's staff—again, at taxpayers' expense.

Ironically, to fund operations, Chao's family firm borrows hundreds of millions every year from Chinese banks—banks owned by the same Communist regime Chao's boss purportedly despises.

In 2019, an inspector general launched a full investigation of Chao's criminal acts, but William Barr tabled the recommendation to prosecute Chao the morning it was received. And because Trump couldn't, Mitch McConnell fired the inspector general that afternoon.

In an interview last week, Walter Shaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics, told AlterNet, "This is the kind of thing you would use in a training class to teach government officials what misuse of a position looks like."

Meantime, the Tennessee supreme court has handed one Abbie Welch a six-year prison sentence for shoplifting from Walmart. 

The court's ruling makes no mention of the item she stole.

Probably a package of pencil liners.