CJ’s Rick Henderson follows the free money benefitting various companies owned by family members of Sen. Kay Hagan. Lots going on here:
But here’s where we stand: Companies owned by family members of Kay Hagan got more than $400,000 in taxpayer funding to finance upgrades at facilities and for businesses they own — not just the $300,000 in stimulus and USDA grants we initially found. The grants used tax dollars to offset the costs of improvements in the physical plant, and provide tax breaks for one of the companies, and reduce the energy bills of another. Kay Hagan’s husband and son created a solar company and allowed it to handle some of the work. And we’re still digging for additional documentation.
Team Hagan has chosen to hire Marc Elias, a high-powered political lawyer and Caitlin Legacki, a crisis-management specialist and former Hagan press secretary, to argue otherwise.
And ask yourself: How can you not benefit from free money?
Absolutely true, but a bigger question remains —did Hagan family members actually try to convert stimulus funds into cold hard cash? CJ reports the Hagans reduced the budget for upgrades to its JDC Manufacturing property by more than $100k but “did not reduce any of the stimulus funding it had requested, and it wasn’t required to do so.”
In the end, “JDC now claims the project wound up costing more, and provided internal documents to WRAL and The News & Observer that allegedly add up to more than $500,000.” And if the company wasn’t “required to reduce any of the stimulus funding it had requested,” then they would say they were just playing by the rules. Perhaps. Come Nov. 4 we have to decide which rules we want to play by.
Update: …And Elizabeth Warren believes Republicans have rigged the game.
