(Headline USA) Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., reportedly ignored warnings from the Senate Ethics Committee about using his position to help his wife, who serves as George Mason University’s interim president.
In 2019, the Senate Ethics Committee raised concerns about Kaine participating in events at Fairfax’s George Mason University given his wife’s role at the school, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
“The Ethics Committee has advised [Kaine’s office] not to do anything with just GMU,” one of Kaine’s aides wrote in a Sept. 26, 2019, email exchange with Kaine and Anne Holton, Kaine’s wife.
Additional emails, however, prove Kaine remained intimately involved with the inner workings of the school and that he may have even used his position to secure policies that benefited it.
In March 2020, for example, Holton told Kaine and his chief of staff that a “state of emergency declaration” related to the COVID-19 pandemic “will help us financially e.g. on some of our contractual obligations.”
The next day, then-Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency.
A few months later, Holton sent Kaine’s office an email titled “IRS Rules on CARES Act Student Emergency Grants.” Kaine then introduced a bill that modified the CARES Act to give universities “flexibility” to determine how they spent emergency pandemic funds.
In November 2020, Holton explicitly asked Kaine for a “favor,” urging him to lobby the White House to appoint her chief of staff, Dietra Trent, to head an initiative on historically black colleges.
A spokesperson for Kaine denied that he had been under any investigation, and claimed Kaine consulted with the Senate Ethics Committee of his own accord “about how to balance representing George Mason, the largest university in Virginia, with his wife’s work there.”
She added: “He has followed the guidance to treat George Mason as he would any other state higher education institution.”
Ironically, political success of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vice presidential running mate may, in some ways be attributable to his wife’s political connections. She is the daughter of Linwood Holton, who served as the Republican governor of Virginia from 1970 to 1974, and was best known for fighting the pro-segregationist Democratic political machine that had long dominated politics in the Old Dominion.
However, while Democrats eventually relented on their racist stance and pivoted toward pandering to minority voters, their affinity for cronyism, dynastic elitism and political back-scratching remains one of the party’s defining characteristics, both in Virginia and beyond.
