RESTON, VA Jan. 22 (DPI) – Former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell was indicted yesterday – with his wife Maureen – on corruption charges stemming from $165,000 in alleged gifts from a Richmond businessman.
The indictment paints a picture of a new governor and his spouse in desperate financial straights, largely because of reckless personal spending and the daunting cost of their daughter’s wedding.
According to the indictment, in 2009 Maureen McDonnell sent an email to a senior staffer of her husband:
“I need to talk to you about Inaugural clothing budget. I need answers and Bob is screaming about the thousands I’m charging up in credit card debt. We are broke, have an unconscionable amount in credit card debt already, and this Inaugural is killing us!! I need answers and I need help, and I need to get this done.”
The indictment then lays out a succession of gifts and a handshake loan provided by the businessman, Jonnie R. Williams, Sr., who sought to improve his company’s prospects by sidling up to the governor.
Yesterday McDonnell declared “I am innocent” of the charges, and readers on comment boards from New York to Richmond quickly pointed out that the ex-governor never said “we” – suggesting to many readers he was prepared to throw his wife under the bus. If convicted both could get decades in prison.
Still, Virginia – until recently – has had some of the weakest ethics rules for politicians in the nation, and those weak rules covered the period of the McDonnells’ alleged misconduct. Prosecutors are likely to face a tough challenge proving that the McDonnells broke ethics laws during the time in question.
McDonnell’s defense lawyers wrote in a motion, which was reported in The Richmond Times-Dispatch, that “because these are practices that the commonwealth has affirmatively chosen to permit, there is no way that Governor McDonnell could have imagined that the federal government would suddenly declare his acceptance of lawful gifts to be a crime.”
Readers were predictably indignant and outraged, and many focused on the tawdry details. The businessman, among other gestures, loaned his Ferrari for the McDonnells while they lodged at his Central Virginia vacation house.
(Richmond Times Dispatch Comment Board)
“What a bunch of poseurs!! OH bring the Ferrari to Smith Mountain Lake so we can drive it around and pretend it’s ours.”
“Sad and pathetic. And even more so the fact they couldn’t afford their own daughter’s wedding…..Maybe if they had to “borrow” the money they should have encouraged her to elope…but that would mean they couldn’t show off.”
Other readers were unimpressed by Maureen McDonnell’s general lack of class:
(6 Recommendations, WashingtonPost.com) “Can’t you just hear her screaming ‘But I’m the Wife of the Governor!'”
(4) “They were not very subtle. The wife should get more time, as she seems to be the one who initiated much of the bribes. The hypocrisy of these “family values” Repubs is breathtaking.”
“The govenor’s wife exhibits a level of tackiness that those women on the ‘Housewife Shows’ can only dream about.”