Department of Transportation Chief Elaine Chao is drawing scrutiny for the many interviews she has done with her father, a shipping magnate in China, over potential ethics issues, Politico reports.
Chief among them, in addition to Chao, a Cabinet official, doing the interviews: Conducting the interviews with the DOT flag behind them, a tacit endorsement of James Chao's shipping company, Foremost Group, over others in China.
"She needs to be careful when she appears that, say, the seal of the Department of Transportation doesn’t appear on the screen," Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert at the Washington University School of Law, told Politico.
Further, Chao cannot use her position for "private gain … or for the private gain of friends, relatives, or persons with whom the employee is affiliated in a nongovernmental capacity."
Touting her father's accomplishments and a biography about him would seem to be straddling the line of doing just that.
"What troubles me about (Chao's interviews) is perhaps it may appear that a person in her situation is using her office and her position in order to publicize her father’s book, or this book about her family,” Hana Callaghan, director of government ethics at Santa Clara University, told Politico.
Elaine Chao's sisters are also executives of Foremost Group, one serving as CEO and another as general counsel, Politico reports.
While a DOT spokesperson rebuffed any notion of impropriety, saying the "appearances are intended to share an inspirational story about immigrants from a minority community who have become successful in our country," the optics tell a different story, experts say.
"Doing business in China requires a lot of connections," Diane Wei Liang, a commentator on Chinese business and politics, told Politico. "Political connections are normally considered as real advantages for business people."
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