Governor Ratf%$#

I am not a fan of Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.

He is implacably opposed to mass transit, and has made his political career on deliberately targeting minorities.

Well, now we learn that there is a corrupt method to his madness. The money hat he has diverted from mass transit, has gone to build roads going to his real estate holdings.

It appears that Donald Trump's self dealing in office is not a norm that he has subverted.

It's just what our corrupt political elites do:

For years, Never Trump Republicans have courted Larry Hogan to run for president. It’s easy to see why. He’s won two gubernatorial elections in Maryland, where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one; he’s currently one of the most popular governors in America; and he’s widely viewed as a moderate who’s willing to reach across the aisle. The late-night talk-show host Seth Meyers recently described him as “a Republican who believes in climate change.” In June, he’s publishing a memoir—a move that suggests he’s laying the groundwork for a 2024 presidential bid. Last spring, he launched a national advocacy group, An America United, designed to break partisan gridlock and “bring people together to advance bold, common-sense solutions for all Americans.” Simply put, everything about Larry Hogan’s public image would lead you to believe he’s the opposite of Donald Trump.

But Hogan, it turns out, has more in common with Trump than his reputation suggests.

Both are real-estate executives who have refused to relinquish their private businesses while in office. Just as Trump maintained his ownership of the Trump Organization when he became president, Hogan maintained ownership of HOGAN, a multipurpose real-estate brokerage firm, when he became governor. Both have left close family members in charge of their businesses—Trump with his children; Hogan with his brother, Timothy—and created arrangements that allow them to be apprised of the company’s dealings. In other words, they have set up situations in which they can use their powerful government positions to increase their private profits.

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Hogan has advanced a number of major state transportation projects that are near properties his company owns, a development that can boost the value of those properties. Before canceling the Red Line, he approved construction of an interchange down the road from a parcel of land his company controlled. Later, he approved millions of dollars in road and sidewalk improvements near property he had bought approximately two years earlier and was turning into a housing development.

Maryland law says that an official may not partake in a decision if the official or a qualifying relative—defined as a parent, spouse, child, or sibling—has an economic interest in the matter and the official or employee knows of the interest. These decisions “certainly seem to implicate the statute,” said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and a former ethics adviser for the International Monetary Fund. “It looks like there’s credible evidence of a violation.”

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But Hogan has not revealed payments he has received from specific real-estate transactions while in office. “He’s getting paid by developers all across the state—who he’s in charge of regulating in one way or another—and the public has no idea who they are,” said Democrat John Willis, a former Maryland secretary of state and now a University of Baltimore politics professor and a historian of Maryland politics and government.

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In February 2018, Maryland Matters, a state-based politics and policy website, reported that Hogan held ownership in a company called Brandywine Crossing Realty Partners LLC. The company was chartered on March 9, 2015, and it became a controlling partner for a parcel of land behind the Brandywine Crossing Shopping Center in Prince George’s County. The land was just down the road from a major state transportation project: a new highway interchange.

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Multiple legislators said they were not informed of the governor’s nearby real-estate interests before voting on his transportation budget. “I certainly had none of this information when working on the budget committees or in discussions,” said Bill Ferguson, a Democratic Maryland state senator, when we spoke in September. (In October, Ferguson was selected to become the Maryland Senate’s next president.) “Had I known this information, I think there would have been much more targeted and purposeful questions about the necessity of projects that appear to have a financial benefit to the governor.” (Hogan listed his holdings in real-estate LLCs in his submission to the Maryland State Ethics Commission, filed 17 days after the legislature approved his first budget, but he did not identify specific properties, let alone the dates of acquisition.)

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Experts I spoke with who reviewed Maryland’s ethics laws were alarmed by the Hogan administration’s decisions around Brandywine and other properties. Richard Painter, a professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a former chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, said that Hogan should have been prohibited from participating in the decision. “The [ethics law] language suggests that he should recuse because the official or employee or qualifying relative—he himself—has an interest in the matter and he knows of the interest,” Painter told me.

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Brandywine isn’t the only place where Hogan has advanced construction projects near his existing property interests. On November 12, 2014, just eight days after his election, Hogan’s company bought a parcel of land from Maryland’s State Highway Administration in Severn, Maryland, for $400,000. The sale was conducted through a public auction, and only one bid was made: by Timothy Hogan. In November 2014, HOGAN created a new LLC called the Villas at Severn Crest. Since Larry Hogan took office, the State Highway Administration has begun a number of transportation projects that could boost the value of that property, including intersection improvements and road resurfacing less than a mile away, which started in 2018.

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But Hogan’s election came with an immediate complication: What would he do with his real-estate business? Maryland ethics law bans officials or employees from making decisions on matters in which they have an economic interest. But the law states that this prohibition does “not apply if participation is allowed as to officials and employees subject to the authority of the [Maryland State] Ethics Commission.” Hogan reached out to the ethics commission for advice.

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In December 2015, Hogan entered into a trust agreement that he asserted would prevent conflicts of interest. On April 15, 2016, the trust was approved by the state ethics commission. Between Hogan’s inauguration and the trust agreement’s approval, the governor submitted two transportation budgets—including the one advancing the Brandywine interchange—and gained ownership of at least seven newly created real-estate LLCs. In other words, Hogan’s real-estate business was growing just as he was supposed to be separating himself from it.

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But even after Hogan began talks with the ethics commission, there were signs that he had not made a clear break from his business. In February 2015, while serving as governor, Hogan himself announced a $3.4 million real-estate transaction in a press release issued by his private company. His administration began construction on projects near both the Villas at Severn Crest and the Riverfront at West Hyattsville after his trust went into place.

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But Hogan’s trust is not blind. The ethics commission granted the governor a “financial-interest exemption,” which allows him to continue to own real-estate projects and to be apprised of his company’s business dealings, as well as how much money he’s making. In a letter to Lord, Hogan wrote that the arrangement “will not prevent me from requesting or receiving information about the status of the Hogan Companies . . . including the status of its current investments and, [sic] the identity of the investors and the locations of real property in which the Hogan Companies have an investment.”

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But the trustees Hogan chose to manage his holdings are not just experts in the real-estate field—they are his previous business associates: Victor White, the chief operating officer of HOGAN; Jacob Ermer, the executive vice president of HOGAN; and David Weiss, a former broker at HOGAN. According to public records, all of them are Hogan campaign contributors. His brother, Timothy, is in charge of his company.

As governor, Hogan has maintained a close relationship with all four of these individuals. He had at least eight meetings with them between 2015 and 2018, according to his meeting calendar, obtained by the Washington Monthly through a Public Information Act request.

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In its specific guidance to Hogan, the commission stated that Hogan could, and should, identify “a specific person within the Governor’s Office to act in his place on any such matters that come to the Office while he continues to retain his financial interest in his businesses.” Yet when I asked Ricci, Hogan’s spokesperson, if the governor had ever recused himself from a decision in his transportation budget that could impact his properties, he was clear that Hogan had not. “The answer is no,” Ricci said. “The governor does not make decisions on individual projects, so he has no decisions to recuse himself from.”

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But Hogan has been, at best, silent over the president’s alleged violations of the Emoluments Clause. In fact, in 2018, he withheld $1 million from the Maryland attorney general’s office to stop a series of lawsuits against Trump, the most prominent of which alleged that the president was using his position to bolster his real-estate empire’s profits.

The governor justified his decision on fiscal grounds. “The administration takes its responsibility to find efficiency and savings in the state budget extremely seriously,” Doug Mayer, a spokesperson for Hogan at the time, told The Baltimore Sun. “This is a perfect example of that.”

Have I mentioned that Governor ratf%$# is a corrupt racist SOB who has no shame or decency?