Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington has charged that China has given $12.7 million to companies owned by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and his family — and that the money is the reason McConnell, in her words, "always bows down to them." Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, made the charge on the American Storytellers podcast, in comments dated Monday, November 2 — the day before Americans vote in the midterm elections.
The family business at the centre of the charge is the Foremost Group, the shipping company founded in New York by James Chao, the father of McConnell's wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, and run today by her sister Angela Chao. Foremost has traded with China for decades and builds its ships there: in 2017 it signed contracts with a subsidiary of the state-owned China State Shipbuilding Corporation for six bulk carriers, at a time when comparable vessels cost about $47 million apiece. The couple's reported net worth rose from an estimated $3.1 million in 2004 to somewhere between $9.2 million and $36.5 million ten years later, helped by a multimillion-dollar gift from James Chao in 2008.
McConnell and Chao have rejected accusations about the family's China ties for years, and a spokesman for Chao has called them baseless. No court or agency has found that McConnell took money from China, and Cantwell's $12.7 million figure is her charge, not a finding: what is documented is the family's shipping business and its Chinese state contracts. In 2021, the Justice Department also declined to open a criminal investigation after an inspector general referred allegations about Chao's conduct as Transportation Secretary.
The charge lands in the middle of America's fight with China. President Trump's administration has made confronting Beijing's influence — through tariffs, sanctions and export controls — a centrepiece of its programme, arguing that Chinese state money should never decide American policy. Cantwell's accusation is that one of the Senate's most powerful Republicans is compromised in exactly that fight. For voters, the question is practical: the senators who vote on China trade, factory jobs and prices should have no family fortune riding on Chinese state contracts on the other side of the table.
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