Oops: Elaine Chao Caught Pimping Her Family Business with China

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06/elaine-chao-china-trip-foremost

The transportation secretary thought it’d be cool to bring family members to government meetings in which they had a financial interest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a normal presidential administration—hell, in a normal professional setting of any kind—it would be considered inappropriate to bring one‘s family members to official work meetings and/or on business trips. But of course, the Trump administration is not normal. Rather, it‘s a family affair, the primary goal of which is to enrich Donald Trump and the people who surround him—who, among others, include his not-very-bright son-in-law. That M.O. starts at the top with the grifter-in-chief, but it also extends to dozens of current and former cabinet members who’ve seen no issue with taking their wives on taxpayer-funded European vacations, using a government plane to get a better shot of the solar eclipse, plunking down $31,000 on dining-room sets, and allegedly planning work travel based on a “desire to visit particular cities or countries.” So it’s not entirely surprising that Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao thought it would be no big deal to bring her relatives—who happen to have major business interests in Beijing—to meetings with government officials during a visit to China in the fall of 2017, but unfortunately for Chao, not everyone in government has adopted Team Trump’s way of thinking.The New York Times reports that in October 2017, an alarmed official at the American Embassy in Beijing wrote an urgent email seeking advice concerning “a series of unorthodox requests” made by Chao‘s office related to her first visit to China as a Trump cabinet member. According to the Times, Chao—who is married to Senate leader Mitch McConnell—wanted federal officials to “coordinate travel arrangements for at least one family member and include relatives in meetings with government officials.” Such requests would be wildly inappropriate for any secretary’s relatives, but were even more so given the Chao family’s business: her father, James Chao, founded Foremost Group, a shipping, trading, and finance company now run by Elaine’s sister Angela Chao. While the company is based in New York, its fleet is, per the Times, “overwhelmingly focused on China,” with roughly 72% of the raw materials it has shipped since early 2018 going to China, cargo that “helps feed” Beijing’s “industrial machine, which manufactures steel products that are a point of dispute in the deepening trade war between” China and the U.S. The company reportedly constructs almost all its vessels in state-owned shipyards in China, some with loans from the Chinese government.