By Peter Galuszka
During the grueling, nearly-six-week-long trial of former Gov. Robert F. and Maureen McDonnell that ended Thursday, one prominent political figure seemed oddly absent – former Atty. Gen. Kenneth Cuccinelli.
The firebrand conservative who lost last year’s gubernatorial contest to Democrat Terry McAuliffe was a significant player in the McDonnell scandal. He took favors from prosecution witness and businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr., such as enjoying airplane rides to New York and Thanksgiving and summer vacations at Williams’ Smith Mountain Lake house.
Like McDonnell, he didn’t initially report Williams’ presents on state disclosure forms and was later cleared by a state prosecutor of any wrong doing. He was placed on the potential witness list by McDonnell’s lawyers but was never called.
Yet Cuccinelli played an early and much-unreported role in the case. Todd Schneider, the governor’s chef who plead guilty to some misdemeanors for stealing food, was apparently first confronted by State Police and the FBI on Feb. 10, 2012. Shortly afterwards, that March, Schneider had long chats with Cuccinelli and his staff about the wrong doing involving Williams and the McDonnells.
Cuccinelli was oddly quiet about the matter until the following November of that year when he further involved the state police and FBI. What took so long? No one seems to know.
There’s no uncertainty about Cuccinelli’s involvement with Williams, however. In the early days of his term as attorney general, some of his staffers were put up at Williams’ 29-acre estate in Goochland County while they found lodging in Richmond. Cuccinelli was reported to have visited the home.
His ties with Williams caused some problems. Cuccinelli had to recuse himself from representing the state in a long-standing lawsuit involving the taxation of some building’s owned by Star Scientific, Williams former company. Other representation was produced at taxpayers’ expense.
During their four years in office, it seemed clear that McDonnell and Cuccinelli disliked each other and often worked at cross purposes. Cuccinelli was a polarizing element on such issues as hounding a former University of Virginia professor on climate change, covering up the lactation gland of the woman on the seal of Virginia, and pushing stringent anti-abortion policies that led to the shutdown of many legal abortion clinics. McDonnell did some of the same but tried a bigger tent approach on his marquee legislation on funding transportation.
Todd Schneider, the chef who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., doesn’t care for Cuccinelli much either. “He’s got the personality of a stone, and he talks forever. I’d sit there and I’d be like, ‘Oh, my God—will you just be quiet?,’ ” Schneider told the Washingtonian.
Tension between McDonnell and Cuccinelli was clearly visible to the staff. “They wouldn’t talk to each other,” Schneider says. “As soon as they took a picture together, they would take off to opposite places in the room.”
Since losing the gubernatorial election and leaving office, Cuccinelli has headed the Senate Conservatives fund. According to the Washington Times, his organization has blown several elections.
