The Last Decade Has Been One Big Self-Serving Merry Christmas For Crooked Bob Corker

We warned you all along not to count on rot-gut conservatives like Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Bob Corker (R-TN) to stand up to Trump in any real way. Name calling is cheap; but when it comes to what really matters, they’re both full-fledged Trumpists. What I didn’t know is that Corker is really corrupt, more so then even your garden variety senator.

In the new Rolling Stone Matt Taibbi wrote that he “spent most of this past summer investigating Corker, whose personal finances have been an open scandal for years.” He offers the chart above showing that “Corker went from having an estimated net worth of zero [and burdened with debt] when he entered the Senate in 2007, to being (as of 2015) the fourth-wealthiest man in the Senate, worth $69 million. How,” asks Taibbi, “do you increase your net worth by 69 million dollars while you're working full-time as a Senator? That is not an easy story to explain.”

It wasn't until Corker took office and filled out disclosure forms that his finances became public— sort of. Few in the media seem ever to have read the "liabilities" section of Corker's first disclosure, where the former mayor and construction magnate listed a series of massive outstanding loans. At the low end, Corker appeared to owe a hair-raising $24.2 million. At the high end, $120.5 million.

He took office in debt to some of the nation's biggest lenders— including somewhere between $12 million and $60 million in debt to GE Capital alone.

Corker had been a construction magnate in Tennessee before taking office, a sort of mini-Trump. Before he ran for office, he sold off his business to a local developer named Henry Luken.

…Corker tested the limits of the profiteering possibilities in the legislative branch, essentially becoming a full-time day-trader who did a little Senator-ing in his spare time.

In the first nine months of 2007, Corker made an incredible 1,200 trades, over four per day, including 332 over a two-day period… By 2014, when Corker sat on the Senate Banking Committee, a position that gave him regular access to prime information about the future direction of the markets, the Tennessee Senator still had his foot on the gas. He made 930 stock trades that year.

…Corker's activities didn't go completely unnoticed. A few ethics groups cried foul over the years.

Anne Weismann, director of the Campaign for Accountability, which filed a complaint against Corker in 2015, described Corker's trading history in damning terms.

"Senator Corker's trades followed a consistent pattern," she said. "He bought low and sold high. It beggars belief to suggest these trades— netting the senator and his family millions— were mere coincidences."

One financial analyst I know said Corker's trading patterns looked more like the work of "an office of multiple analysts all grinding at least 60 hours a week" than like the work of "one guy moonlighting as a Senator."

When Corker took on Trump this fall— saying the White House was "an adult day care center" and that Trump's behavior threatened "World War III”— he suddenly became a darling of sorts in the liberal media.

Now he's a bad guy again, for reportedly doing what he's always done, acting in his own financial interest while earning a paycheck as a U.S. Senator.

The Corker story to me is a classic example of why it's always dangerous to overlook a politician's failings because he happens to be on the right side of some partisan debate at a given moment in time. The reason is obvious: these types eventually revert to form, and soon enough, a politician's flaws will be working against you again, rather than for you.