Elaine Chao Is Filling Up the Swamp

Elaine Chao and friends.Shealah Craighead via ZUMA

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At the Department of Transportation, projects are doled out based on formulas and metrics that treat every state equally. But it turns out that some states are more equal than others. You see, the secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao, is married to Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, who is running for reelection next year in Kentucky. So she asked her chief of staff to pay special attention to the state’s needs and act as liaison:

Chao’s aide Todd Inman, who stated in an email to McConnell’s Senate office that Chao had personally asked him to serve as an intermediary, helped advise the senator and local Kentucky officials on grants with special significance for McConnell….He also discussed the project by phone with Al Mattingly, the chief executive of Daviess County, which includes Owensboro, who suggested Inman was instrumental in the process.

….“Todd probably smoothed the way, I mean, you know, used his influence,” Mattingly said in a Politico interview….“Well, let’s put it this way: I only have her ear an hour when I go to visit her once a year,” he added of Chao and Inman, a longtime Bluegrass State operative who had worked as McConnell’s advance man. “With a local guy, he has her ear 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You tell me.

“You tell me” indeed. That’s some mighty good swamp draining going on in the Trump cabinet.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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