Mary-Shea Sutherland. Photo credit: Times-Dispatch
by James A. Bacon
With each new day of testimony, the trial of Maureen and Bob McDonnell is becoming more a trial of Maureen and less a trial of Bob. There was abundant evidence in previous testimony that the former first lady was out of control, sending members of the former governor’s staff scrambling to rein in inappropriate behavior. But yesterday’s testimony revealed that life was even worse inside the governor’s mansion, where there was no buffer between Maureen and those who worked under her. It is increasingly clear that the first lady was the motive source of the outrageous behavior that prompted the charges against her husband and her.
As Mary-Shea Sutherland, former chief of staff to the first lady, described her in testimony yesterday, Maureen was the boss from hell. Sutherland depicted Maureen as “a screamer” and a “nutbag” who frequently tongue-lashed the staff. The incidents were so frequent and so bad that Sutherland conferred with Bob’s chief of staff, Martin Kent, about incidents involving Maureen, including “a lot of yelling and screaming” about reimbursements the first family would have to make to the state.
“It was almost two years of emotional stress,” Sutherland testified. “I couldn’t protect the staff. It was a state of constant stress; going to work in the morning with your stomach in a knot.”
Finally, Sutherland couldn’t take it anymore and started looking for another job. She approached Jonnie Williams Sr., president of Star Scientific, who has testified that he lavished gifts upon the McDonnells in the hope of gaining their assistance in promoting his Anatabloc vitamin supplement. Williams promised her a job, backed down and then told Maureen about it. That disclosure, reports the Times-Dispatch, sent the first lady on a tear through Sutherland’s office. Maureen demanded Sutherland’s computer password and rifled through her desk.
Sutherland’s testimony is of more than voyeuristic interest. It further illuminates the dysfunction within the governor’s household during a period in which Maureen and Bob McDonnell accepted gifts and loans from Williams exceeding $150,000 in value and acted in various capacities to promote his product and solicit state research funds for his company. So far, the evidence suggests that Maureen initiated all, or nearly all, of the incidents under investigation.
That is not to condone Bob’s behavior in going along — it is simply to explain it. I have conjectured that Bob engaged in conflict-avoidance behavior, torn between doing what he knew to be ethical and a desire to escape his wife’s harangues. I believe that Bob labored long, workaholic hours on state business, in part to avoid a conflict-ridden home life, and left his wife to rule the roost. Previous testimony, by son Bobby McDonnell, describes how McDonnell had objected to Bobby accepting a gift of new golf clubs from Williams but how Bobby and Maureen overrode him.
By facilitating meetings between Williams and state officials, a routine favor dispensed by governors, and by appearing at promotional events, Bob sought to do enough to assuage Maureen but not too much, he hoped, to cross into illegality. He may have crossed the line, however, when accepting loans from Williams to bail out his bad real estate investments and, allegedly, conspiring to hide the transaction. (We’ll have to hear his testimony before drawing firm conclusions.)
Sutherland’s testimony provides other clues about the McDonnell-family dysfunction. Maureen’s out-of-control behavior may well have been the cause of the family’s terrible finances in the first place. As she told Sutherland while shopping for her inaugural wear in New York, her credit cards were “maxed out.” In other words, Maureen had been trying to live a champagne lifestyle on a beer budget long before she reached the governor’s mansion and met Jonnie Williams.
Maureen told Sutherland that her family was “buried in debt” due to expenses and sagging real estate investments. Notably, though, she did not want to sell the family’s $835,000 home in Wyndham, in the affluent West End of Henrico County. That remark was highly revealing.
Let’s do a little math. Let’s assume the McDonnells paid a 20% down payment when they purchased the house in late 2005/early 2006 when Bob took the job of attorney general. That would have left them with a mortgage of about $670,000. Let’s assume they paid a 7% interest rate, which was prevalent at that time. That would imply annual payments of principal, interest, taxes and insurance of more than $50,000 a year, or a third of the AG’s salary and more than is financially prudent. It’s possible that they refinanced at lower rates in later years, bringing down the payments somewhat but the overall burden would not have changed significantly. If they paid a smaller down payment, the burden would have been commensurately higher.
The McDonnells had the misfortune to purchase a very expensive house (by Richmond standards) near the tail end of the real estate bubble. Prices collapsed shortly thereafter. If they had paid less than 20% down payment, their mortgage might well have been underwater, which may explain why Maureen didn’t want to sell. On the other hand, the cost of servicing the mortgage undoubtedly was considerably higher than the rent they could charge to any tenant. ($40,000 a year seems to be the maximum rent for houses of comparable size in the Wyndham area today.) If we throw in maintenance costs — we know that was an issue because Williams sent his brother out there to do landscaping work — we can conclude that the residence was bleeding $1,000 a month or more. The McDonnells’ Virginia Beach beach property was probably hemorrhaging even more.
Here’s the first question: Whom do you suppose was the driving force behind buying an $835,000 house, Bob or Maureen? Whom do you suppose was the driving force behind buying a beach house, the man who lived for politics or the wife who had an insatiable taste for luxury?
Here’s the second question: When she had two mortgages to pay and five kids to clothe and feed, what the H-E-double hockey sticks was Maureen doing maxing out her credit card? We no little about her life as wife of the attorney general, but it is crystal clear that she was unwilling to curb her lifestyle as a governor’s wife to live within the family’s means.
I am willing to bet large sums of money that Maureen was the one who insisted upon investing in the beach property and that she was the one who had to have an $835,000 McMansion in Richmond’s West End. I’m willing to bet that she made Bob’s life miserable until she got what she wanted. In other words, she was the architect of the family’s disastrous finances. Further, I’ll lay odds that her uncontrollable behavior has a psychiatric origin. She shows every sign of someone suffering from clinical depression. Again, I’m not seeking to excuse or justify her behavior, only to explain it. If Maureen hadn’t caused so much havoc in the lives of those around her, I’d feel sorry for her. She is a deeply troubled woman.
Update: Paul Goldman is much more sympathetic to Maureen McDonnell than I am. But his column is worth reading.
