Republican Crime Blotter: Nepotism Has Its Privileges

They don't even bother to disguise it any more:

The Transportation Department under Secretary Elaine Chao designated a special liaison to help with grant applications and other priorities from her husband Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, paving the way for grants totaling at least $78 million for favored projects as McConnell prepared to campaign for reelection.

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 — including a highway-improvement project in a McConnell political stronghold that had been twice rejected for previous grant applications.

And no, it's not normal, except in a swamp:

“Where a Cabinet secretary is doing things that are going to help her husband get reelected, that starts to rise to the level of feeling more like corruption to the average American. … I do think there are people who will see that as sort of ‘swamp behavior,’” said John Hudak, a Brookings Institution scholar who has studied political influence in federal grant-making.

It's not the only example of the McConnell- Chao corruption nexus.  There was this bit of influence peddling that was nipped in the bud.  Then there's this from last May:

President Donald Trump has tapped the brother-in-law of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to lead the federal agency tasked with making sure workers get the benefits they are owed from private pension funds.

Gordon Hartogensis is Trump's nominee to lead the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the independent agency created by Congress in 1974 to essentially pay out pension benefits to workers if their private pension funds fail. Hartogensis is married to Grace Chao, the younger sister of Elaine Chao, the current U.S. Transportation Secretary. The elder Chao is married to McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky.

Hartogensis was confirmed by the rotted out Republican Senate and sworn in a year later, on May 15. Score another one for the swamp!