Maddow Calls Out Fmr Transportation Sec. Elaine Chao Over IG Report: Even Second Graders Would Know This Is Corruption

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow opened her show Wednesday covering new reporting about Trump Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and serious allegations of ethics breaches.

A newly released DOT IG report said Chao used her own office to “help family members who run a shipping business.” The IG apparently referred the matter to the Justice Department but it declined to open a criminal investigation.

Maddow asked viewers to imagine they were a second grader asked what it means to be a corrupt public official:

“One of the things you might conjure up from a second grader’s level understanding of that concept is hypothetically, you might have a person in the government whose job in the government was they were in charge of road-building projects. Right? That person could not also own part of a company that was the country’s biggest supplier of road building materials. Right? If you were a second grader trying to show you understood what corruption is, that would be like an almost oversimplified example of what it would mean to be corrupt. Being in charge of road-building while also holding a personal financial stake in company that does road-building that stands to benefit financially from your actions as public official.”

She went through details of the allegations against Chao, including using staff to arrange a 2017 trip to China and asking the State Department “to arrange for two cars for a six-person delegation, which included Ms. Chao’s younger sister Angela Chao, who had succeeded their father as head of the family shipping company, and Angela Chao’s husband, the venture capitalist Jim Breyer.”

The trip was cancelled in the end, and Maddow remarked with a laugh, “I mean, come on! The Trump administration had a lot of corruption scandals. This is the kind you can fit in capital letters and fit on a bumper sticker.”

You can watch above, via MSNBC.