Knowing now how the Bob McDonnell trial ended, it’s worth taking a look back at how it began: with a disgruntled cook who turned incriminating records over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Virginia State Police. The Washington Post’s Rosalind S. Helderman and Matt Zapotosky catch up with the former chef (executive chef to you) to the McDonnells at his new home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Todd Schneider was fired in March 2012 after being accused of stealing food bought by the taxpayers to supply his side catering business. (He maintains that he had worked out a barter system with Virginia first lady Maureen McDonnell.) Schneider’s providing police with a $15,000 catering check from dietary supplement honcho Jonnie Williams, Jr., put authorities on the McDonnells’ scent, and they eventually turned up about $177,000 worth of gifts and loans Williams laid on the McDonnells in exchange for some promotion of his wares at state events.
Schneider in turn was able to plead no contest to two misdemeanors and pay a fine. Leaving behind a soured reputation in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Schneider set up shop in the Venice of America, and he now claims to feel pity for his former pal Maureen McDonnell.
Schneider’s reminiscences are both slippery and precise. A giggly wine party between the exec chef and the first lady is interrupted by persistent phone calls from the governor. Maureen McDonell’s irregular hours are detailed. (“He said he would often get texts from the first lady about the mansion’s food late at night, sometimes after midnight.”) But the question of why one of Schneider’s underlings, rather than Schneider himself, testified at the McDonnells’ trial goes unanswered. The chef is at the same time bitter over what he believes was a railroading from the governor’s mansion and effusive about the McDonnell’s sexual chemistry.
“Even when the spotlight was off, you would see them being cuddly and in love,” he says, a characterization that conveniently undercuts the legal defense the McDonnells were still using when Schneider apparently gave the interview. (The defense — that the state’s first couple had been estranged and under emotional strain — did not work, as the former governor was convicted on 11 of 13 counts and the former first lady on nine of 13 counts. The McDonnells will be sentenced in January.)
While the desire to romanticize the days of footmen and scullions seems to be deathless (even the first family of the United States tunes into Downton Abbey, lest we ever be allowed to forget), the 21st-century model of running your own home with more powerful tools but no human attendants carries distinct advantages. The primary advantage is that in the lordly past you and I and almost everybody else would have been the attendants, not the lords. Another is that a self-cleaning oven won’t work out a grudge against you.
The case against Robert and Maureen McDonnell originated in petty malice and never really moved beyond it. That the McDonnnells are going to prison over a total figure of $177,000 is a cruel joke on the public in a state that managed to liquidate $42.7 billion of the people’s money during McDonnell’s last full year in office. The taxes are high, the services are poor, and the traffic stinks. The governor’s wife (one of 50 such counts and countesses across a nation that already pays to maintain a presidential family in high style) is swanning around with an executive chef and that’s considered normal. Yet we’re supposed to be happy because somebody’s been caught with less than the down payment on a four-bedroom house in Loudoun County.
The only government that would not attract oily influence peddlers like Johnnie Williams would be one that does not have billions of dollars in goodies to give away. We have the opposite of that kind of government, and stories like this one remind us that we have it not only in Washington but in many smaller versions at the state, county, and municipal levels. Enforcing gift limits on the Senate candy dish or throwing people in prison for “lending the prestige of the governor’s office” are not going to solve the problem. The low character of so many people around the McDonnells is striking, but can you imagine the kind of people Terry McAuliffe hangs out with? It is foolish to give a person an executive chef and a mansion and a staff and a $43 billion budget, and not expect him to act like royalty.