She has repeatedly been labeled corrupt during her years in Congress yet California Democrat Maxine Waters somehow has emerged as the hero of the liberals’ resistance movement by bashing the ethical lapses of the Trump administration.
In particular, the millennials who despise the president hail Waters on social media as an all-around “badass” as they eagerly await her next hard-hitting tweet to take aim at the Oval Office. Waters has called for the impeachment of President Trump dozens of times.
At 78 years old (three years older than Bernie Sanders), Waters’ rock star status was on full display in May when she received a standing ovation from an audience of celebrities at the televised MTV Movie and TV Awards.
What many of her young admirers probably don’t realize – or choose to ignore – is that Waters was named by a watchdog group as one of the “most corrupt members of Congress” four times in a 7-year stretch – 2005, 2006, 2009 and 2011. Yet, seasoned Democrats well versed in her battles with the House Ethics Committee seem to embrace her sudden iconic role as a leader of the anti-Trump movement known by the hashtag #Resistance.
“The millennials keep telling me for the most part they’ve never heard someone talk like that before,” Waters said recently, which is a remark reminiscent of the adulation Trump’s caustic comments on the stump generated among his conservative working class fans in 2016.
Waters’ ascent began when she refused to attend Trump’s inauguration and it has reached the point where her image and quotes appear on T-shirts and posters, according to the Los Angeles Times. In a matter of months, the veteran congresswoman’s Twitter followers zoomed up from 46,000 to nearly 300,000.
“When I grow up, I want to be @MaxineWaters. Thank you, Rep. Waters, for being unafraid to speak the truth,” one young Twitter user recently posted.
In interview after interview, the Los Angeles Democrat entrenches her status as the matriarch of the millennials. They affectionately call her Auntie Maxine.
Criticism from liberals
Yet, her harshest critics are the folks at CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal nonprofit that gave her those four “most corrupt” designations. And the online publication that recently pointed out her checkered past, The Daily Beast, is certainly no Breitbart.
While the lawmaker bashes Trump on a number of fronts, her indiscretions have a familiar ring: potential corruption, abusing her position of authority, nepotism and sweetheart deals for family members.
The most serious allegations faced by Waters came in 2008, at the onset of the nation’s financial crisis, when she arranged meetings with Treasury Department officials and the quickly sinking OneUnited Bank. Waters’ husband was a stockholder and board member at OneUnited and the bank’s executives were major contributors to her campaigns. In the end, the small California bank somehow received $12 million in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money.
The matter was investigated by the House Ethics Committee, which charged her with violations of House ethics rules in 2010, but after three years of probing her colleagues cleared her. Waters’ chief of staff, her grandson, Mikael Moore, received an official reprimand for actions “unambiguously intended to assist OneUnited specifically.”
Moore’s role as Waters’ top aide has also come under scrutiny. Anti-nepotism rules in the House ban members of Congress from hiring most family members. But grandchildren somehow were not on the list of prohibited hires when Waters brought Moore aboard.
According to a 2004 report by the Los Angeles Times, Waters’ relatives had made more than $1 million during the preceding eight years by doing business with companies, candidates and causes that Waters had assisted. One included a shady deal in which her husband received nearly $500,000 for helping a bond company though he had no experience in the bond business.
Waters has also been roundly criticized by good-government groups for a perceived pay-to-play operation which allows her to skirt federal campaign contribution limits while charging large sums of money in exchange for endorsing down-ballot candidates.
For a fee of between $250 and $45,000 (or $170,000 in one instance) candidates and political groups can get the congresswoman’s official backing. The fee earns them a spot on the Waters’ election slate and more specifically on mailers that are sent out to voters. Waters’ daughter, Karen Waters, has garnered nearly $650,000 for running the mailer operation while her consulting company is paid to manage it.
Citizens Against Government Waste, another watchdog group, named Waters their June 2009 “Porker of the Month” due to her efforts to obtain an earmark for the Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center – a Los Angeles job training facility with a shaky reputation.
Reporter lectured about bringing up the past
Despite all these apparent transgressions, Waters chose to lecture a Daily Beast reporter last month when he asked questions about her past.
She suggested that bringing up longstanding criticisms of her ethics record was an attempt to insulate Trump from scrutiny.
“I want you to think about that and think about whether or not this is a story you really want to do,” she said during the Daily Beast interview.
In contrast, Ken Boehm of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative watchdog group, told the publication that Democrats’ embrace of Waters seems quite peculiar.
“When ethics groups of all political leanings agree that a particular member of Congress does not have the minimal ethics needed for the position, it is strange that that member parades as an advocate of ethics,” Boehm said. “That describes the current odd posturing of Maxine Waters.”
Beyond her far-from-sterling reputation, Waters has spent 26 years in Congress playing the role of a left-wing bomb-thrower in tune with the likes of quirky liberal brethren such as Michael Moore, Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader.
Waters visited Cuba a number of times in the past and routinely praised Fidel Castro. She twice served as national co-chair of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, in 1984 and 1988.
At a 2011 town hall meeting she said, “The tea party can go straight to Hell … and I intend to help them get there.” When the riots broke out in her Los Angeles district following the Rodney King verdict, she called them a legitimate “rebellion.”
And at one point in the 1990s she called for a federal investigation to determine whether U.S intelligence agencies contributed to the crack cocaine epidemic in South Central L.A., including wild allegations of smuggling and selling drugs by the CIA.
So, while the political newbies see her as a folk hero who is “shaking it up and telling the truth,” many of those who have known her for decades seem to fully accept her questionable ways of doing business in California political circles.
The Daily Beast talked with Jewett Walker, who ran several South Los Angeles campaigns in the past and is now a Baptist pastor in the area. Walker said he expects Waters’ endorsement to carry even more weight in 2018 because of the attention she’s getting as a #Resistance leader.
“You don’t walk up to Auntie Maxine and ask for an endorsement without having some really important things to say about what you hope to accomplish and what qualifies you to run at this time,” Walker said. “When Maxine gets on board and the community realizes that she is supporting a particular candidate, that brings a lot of sway to a particular race, if everything else is equal.”
The reverend never mentioned the price tag for this pay-to-play operation, or the big pay day for Waters’ daughter.
Photo: NBC News screenshot
