The Secret Empire of Mitch McConnell and His Wife, the Head of the Transportation Department

Senator Mitch McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, is the Secretary of the Department of Transportation, and another plum government job may be handed to their family as her sister’s husband, Gordon Hartogensis, has been nominated to be the new director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.  Peter Schweizer, author Secret Empires, revealed that Elaine Chao’s family owns a major shipping company in China that is reliant on the Chinese government contracts.  Chao has international authority over US transportation, such as the flow into ports, that can affect trade.

Audio Interview with Author Peter Schweizer

Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer, author of Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, joined SiriusXM hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Tonight to discuss the nomination of Gordon Hartogensis, brother-in-law to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to lead the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

“The McConnell-Chao family, they have a large extended family. In fact, Elaine Chao has five sisters. Those sisters are, like Elaine, very smart and very well-educated. Grace Chao, her younger sister, her husband has been nominated to serve as the head of the pension guarantees fund corporation that the federal government runs,” Schweizer explained.

“This is basically a government entity that is supposed to serve as a quasi-insurance for a corporate pension,” he continued. “If you have a corporation that has a pension fund set up for employees, and they have a bad couple of years, and they have to declare bankruptcy, the pension is protected by the federal government. That’s the theory behind it.”

“Grace Chao’s husband has been nominated for this position,” he said. “The nomination came out. There was very little on his background. It was not made clear the fact that he is related to Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chao.”

“What’s also interesting is there’s very little background on him. They simply list him as an entrepreneur. The problem is that he really doesn’t seem to have any background whatsoever in the pension business, in the finance business. He’s done a little bit of work in the tech space, and he has managed some family trusts. That’s all that is known about him,” said Schweizer.

“It raises all kinds of questions about nepotism, about qualifications,” he said. “We, of course, have discussed the financial entanglements of the Chao family on this program before and in my book. I think it adds a further layer of intrigue to precisely what this family is up to in Washington, DC.”

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