Former Virginia governor (as of less than two weeks ago) Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, have been indicted on multiple federal counts related to accepting high-dollar loans, gifts and other amenities from a campaign donor interested in getting a business leg up from state government.
That’s the story making headlines. The buried lede is the reason the McDonnells would have had any interest in loans and gifts and private plane rides and the like.
“We are broke, have an unconscionable amount in credit card debt already, and this inaugural is killing us!”
That’s from an email from Maureen McDonnell to a senior staffer in the days leading up to the 2010 inauguration of her husband. The federal indictment paints an unflattering picture of the McDonnells’ finances as they were heading into the governor’s mansion and during their four-year residency there.
The McDonnells’ real-estate business, like others, was hit hard by the recession that began in late 2007. As recently as February 2013, according to an email cited in the federal indictment, McDonnell was pressuring his children to pitch in to push rentals of the company’s beach houses to their friends to get more money rolling in.
“Kids. Asking for help. (N)eed to rent the beach houses at Sandbridge more. Willing to give your friends a discount for the times it’s tougher to rent,” he wrote in a family email.
There’s no shame in going through tough times. It gets a little harder to have sympathy for the McDonnells, though, when you consider what appears to be Maureen McDonnell’s near-profligate spending habits.
“Bob is screaming about the thousands I’m charging up in credit card debt,” she wrote in the pre-inaugural email cited in the indictment.
Then there’s the text that she sent to Jonnie Williams, the then-CEO of Star Scientific, the source of the more than $165,000 in personal loans and gifts at the center of the scandal, showing her husband driving Williams’ Porsche.
There was an April 2011 shopping trip to New York to shop for Oscar de la Renta, Louis Vuitton and Bergdorf Goodman. And then a $15,000 gift later that year to help pay for a McDonnell daughter wedding. And a Rolex watch.
So part of this story is that the McDonnells were struggling financially because of the recession, and the other part of the story is that the McDonnells just couldn’t seem to have enough.
As most of us know, it’s one thing to have to work a little harder to get rentals on your real estate, which is just working harder to make ends meet, and another to fret over what designer you’re going to wear to an inaugural ball.
Whether the loans and gifts were given and accepted with any kind of quid pro quo related to Star Scientific and its dealings with state government will be decided in the months ahead by a jury of the McDonnells’ peers.
The court of public opinion is already weighing in on what it was that put the power couple in this position in the first place.
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