Terry McAuliffe and I go way back. I first started writing about him in 1997, when Mother Jones assigned me to look into a lawsuit in DC Superior Court in which McAuliffe, the Democrats' super-fundraiser, was being sued by some of his business associates. That story turned into something much bigger. I went down the rabbit hole of McAuliffe's business dealings, probing his relationship with a pension fund run by a union he raised lots of money from—a money trail that ended up making McAuliffe part of my life for over a year. During that time, he never returned one of my phone calls and I never had the opportunity to meet in person the glad-handing, boyish "Macker," who first drew headlines by wrestling an alligator for a political donation. Nonetheless, the time I spent covering McAuliffe—who became head of the Democratic Party during George W. Bush's first term—has left me dumbfounded that he (according to the polls) is poised to become the next governor of Virginia.
Allow me to explain. McAuliffe represents an unseemly slice of Washington. His primary role in politics for the past two decades or more has been raising money—most notably, for the Clintons. He cooked up the idea of essentially renting out the Lincoln bedroom during the Clinton administration as a fundraising vehicle, and he smashed all previous presidential fundraising records in the process. When McAuliffe was the Dems' top fundraiser, a campaign finance scandal besieged the Clinton White House. Coincidence? No. McAuliffe was all about pushing the envelope when it came to the political money chase.
That alone might not be enough to render him a distasteful political candidate. What's different about McAuliffe is his brazen mixing of his campaign fundraising activity and attempts to enrich himself personally. Many of McAuliffe's business deals have come about due to his place in the political cosmos, not because he possesses a wealth of business skill. That tangled history has linked him to a long list of unsavory characters.
Let's take a look at some of his business associates over the years.
