by James A. Bacon
A sordid tale grew even more squalid yesterday as Jonnie Williams Sr., the star witness against Maureen and Bob McDonnell, spent the day on the witness stand. Williams, the former CEO of vitamin-supplement maker Star Scientific, declaimed that, despite all the time he had spent with them and gifts he had lavished upon them, the McDonnells “were not my friends.”
Williams also elaborated upon the grabbiness of McDonnell family members, which extended beyond designer clothes, a wedding reception, real estate loans, golf outings, the use of his private jet, landscaping services, a weekend getaway at Smith Mountain Lake and a Rolex watch. At the prompting of her mother, McDonnell daughter Cailin informed Williams that she had picked out a car for him to buy her. A McDonnell finally bumped up against the limits of what Williams was prepared to do to win state support for his Anatabloc vitamin supplements. “I told her I just couldn’t buy a car,” he testified.
But grabbiness is not illegal. The McDonnells’ behavior was stupefyingly gauche and beyond the pale of acceptable social behavior. It was grotesque to see in the First Family of Virginia. But grabbiness does not, in and of itself, constitute corruption. It’s corruption only if the McDonnells performed substantive official acts in return for his largesse. And so far, the evidence of that is borderline. Williams received remarkably little for his $145,000-plus investment in the McDonnell family: a couple of introductions to state officials, the use of the Governor’s Mansion for a Star Scientific event, and three appearances by Maureen McDonnell at Star Scientific events outside the state. (I expect there to be considerable debate over whether these constitute unusual “official” actions.)
But if Bob McDonnell’s personal reputation was worthy of the Sears scratch-and-dent sale before the trial, it could well end up in the dumpster by the time this is over. To my mind, the most potentially damaging testimony yesterday concerned conversations between Williams and McDonnell to transfer stock certificates to McDonnell that he could borrow against to help with cash flow problems on his beach property. According to the Times-Dispatch reporting, Williams testified that he was concerned that such a deal would have to reported to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, so he never went through with it. But he added this critical detail indicating McDonnell’s state of mind: He said that McDonnell told him that he had his own disclosure problem.
That revelation — if it goes uncontradicted by McDonnell — seems especially relevant to two of the charges against him. Count Twelve alleges that McDonnell failed to include a $50,000 loan from Williams when listing personal liabilities of $2,075,000 in a financial application to TowneBank. County Thirteen alleges that Maureen and Bob McDonnell omitted mention of what by then had grown to $120,000 in loans from Williams in a loan application to PenFed. (A small digression: The liabilities they listed had soared to $2.8 million by then, an extraordinary increase of roughly $750,000 over four months. That’s a story worth digging into.) If Williams’ story holds up that the governor was acutely aware of his own disclosure issues, it will be difficult for McDonnell to argue that those omissions were an unintentional oversight.
The defense attorneys are sure to paint Williams as a huckster, swindler and self-confessed liar (he admitted yesterday to laying to federal authorities when they first investigated the case) out to save his own skin, which, given his track record, won’t be hard to do. Such a strategy may keep the McDonnells out of jail but it won’t salvage their reputation. Any thinking person would have to ask: How astonishingly poor was McDonnell’s judgment to accept gifts from, and obligate himself to, such a snake?
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