Today’s star witness was Mary-Shea Sutherland, Maureen McDonnell’s chief of staff. She described a First Lady practically out of control — “a nutbag,” as she called her once. As WTVR’s Twitter feed put it, “Folks it is open season on Maureen McDonnell by Mary Shea Sutherland.” Maureen was described as screaming at Mary-Shea, as being difficult to work for, as being deeply in debt and maxed out on credit cards, to the point that Mary-Shea actually paid for Maureen’s inauguration dress when Maureen couldn’t find any other way to scrape up the money to pay for it.
Sutherland said that she never saw any indication of a romantic relationship between Maureen and Jonnie, and related one story that I am sure the prosecution believes will show that Jonnie had no romantic feelings toward Maureen — Maureen told Jonnie that Bob fell in love with her when she was wearing a yellow dress, so he went out and bought her a yellow dress. I’m sure that this will set up the prosecution argument that “they had no romantic relationship — what kind of guy who is trying to have an affair with a man’s wife buys a dress for her in her husband’s favorite color?”
This actually points up one of the odd things about this case — the evidentiary value of unrequited feelings.
Let’s assume that there is no physical relationship between Jonnie and Maureen (everyone has denied it, and there is no evidence of one, at least so far).
The prosecution’s narrative is enhanced if the jury believes that Jonnie Williams was cultivating Maureen McDonnell — playing her like a violin. From the prosecution’s side of things, it doesn’t matter WHY Maureen wanted to help Jonnie Williams — only that she did. If he saw that his best advocate with Bob was Maureen, he needed to motivate her to want to help. And she clearly wanted to help. She held the Anatabloc launch party at the Governor’s Mansion. She flew down to Florida to help make a sales pitch at what amounted to a high-class Tupperware party. She wanted to be appointed to the Star Scientific board of directors (McDonnell’s staff nixed that one). She clearly relished being in Jonnie Williams’ presence, and it doesn’t matter to the prosecution whether the reason that she felt that way about Williams was that he was the one man who was willing to make time for her in his day, or whether he was her gravy train. To the prosecution, it really doesn’t matter why she was acting to get Bob to advance the cause of Star Scientific.
This narrative makes Jonnie Williams out to be a complete cad, but that should hardly be news to the jury by this point in the trial.
And in one sense, the defense doesn’t completely mind if Williams is made out to be a snake-oil salesman, as the McDonnell staff thought of him. The closing argument to the jury is going to be, “This case rises and falls on the testimony of Jonnie Williams, someone whom you have now seen was a lying, manipulating con man. If you can’t trust him, you can’t trust anything that the government has put out there.”
Now, in a purely technical sense, that is not true. In a purely technical sense, the rest of the documentary paper trail may make out the case better than anything that Jonnie Williams says. But remember that Bob McDonnell is expected to testify, and he will likely do so in about the third or fourth week of the trial, probably only a few days before the jury deliberates. And he will be selling himself as the Governor who would do anything to promote Virginia industry because that’s his job, particularly in a recession. So if the jury compares the two men, odds are that they will want to accept McDonnell’s answers over Williams’ manipulations.
One digression —
I had not noticed one bit of testimony from Tuesday, reported in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, from Governor McDonnell’s counselor and senior policy adviser Jasen Eige — he testified about a late-night email that Bob McDonnell had sent him in February, 2012 that said, “Pls see me about anatabloc issues at VCU and UVA.” Eige responded to the email, “We need to be careful with this issue.” McDonnell’s e-mail had sent the late-night email to Eige just six minutes after he messaged Williams about arrangements for a $50,000 loan to the McDonnell’s real estate LLC. Jonnie Williams’ “Starwood Trust” wrote that $50,000 check on March 6, 2012.
I have not seen a clear time-line about the McDonnell response to that request to Eige to talk about “Anatabloc issues at VCU and UVA.” Witnesses over the past few days have described the Anatabloc product launch at the Governor’s Mansion in November, 2011, attended by doctors from both VCU and UVA who had been invited on official Governor’s Office stationery; both doctors said that the event “felt like an official function.” Both doctors testified that at that function, Jonnie Williams gave them $25,000 checks, made out to their respective schools, to underwrite proposals to the Virginia Tobacco Commission to study Anatabloc. But it is not clear to me, based on media reports (since I am not in the courtroom), what the McDonnells were doing between to help Star Scientific in the interim, other than playing golf at Kinloch Country Club on Jonnie Williams’ tab. And most important, what, if anything, did Bob McDonnell do for Star Scientific after the $50,000 check was written? If the $50,000 check was a bribe, what did it motivate McDonnell to do?
I recognize that evidence usually comes in in a very disjointed fashion when there are a lot of witnesses, each one of whom puts in only a few pieces of the puzzle. The jury is allowed to take notes. If the jury is focusing on those dates, hopefully they will see the timeline that is hard to make out at the moment.
