About Bob Corker

He'll be getting out just in time to hopefully stave off more scrutiny.

I spent most of this past summer investigating Corker, whose personal finances have been an open scandal for years. Everything you need to know about the Senator can be discerned from this chart.

Click on that link and you'll see: Corker went from having an estimate net worth of zero when he entered the Senate in 2007, to being (as of 2015) the fourth-wealthiest man in the Senate, worth $69 million.

  Matt Taibbi

I wonder how you get into the Senate with a net worth of zero. (Actually, the chart shows it at below zero.)

Corker was a country-club Republican who used an old Southern formula to get elected. He benefited from a lurid race-baiting RNC ad that showed a white woman winking and asking Corker's African-American opponent, Democrat Harold Ford, to "Call me!"

Aha.

How do you increase your net worth by 69 million dollars while you're working full-time as a Senator?

[...]

Corker took office in January, 2007, during the last gasp of the Bush/Rove political juggernaut. The Iraq war had gone south and the Republicans had just been routed in midterms. The financial crisis was just around the corner. And nobody paid attention to the smooth-talking freshman Senator from Tennessee, who turned out to have some financial issues.

[...]

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 desperately needed that Senate seat then, didn't he?

It has always been Corker's contention that when he sold his business [to a local developer Henry Luken] prior to running for the Senate], his debts were also sold, meaning he was not technically in debt when he went to Washington. Still, he continued to list the loans as liabilities.

Maybe we should check into that sale to Henry Luken.

But even if the loans were discharged when he sold his company, it's what happened after Corker got elected that boggles the mind.

[...]

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.

With a little insider help perhaps?

"Soon after taking office in January of 2007, rather than continuing to have a broker make discretionary transactions on his behalf throughout the day or week on a wide range of stocks in various companies, the senator felt it would be prudent to eliminate this arrangement," Johnson said.

[...]

I can offer no commentary shedding light on what this means, except to say that at the bottom of all of this is the still-incontrovertible fact that Corker made a truly awesome number of financial transactions while in office.

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.

Of his colleagues on the committee, Rhode Island's Jack Reed made 39 trades, Pennsylvania's Patrick Toomey 26, and nobody else made any – meaning Corker made 93.5% of all trades made by the legislators most plugged-in to the country's finances.

[...]

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."

[...]

Corker's name sometimes comes up in stories about other members of Congress who trade auspiciously and often. There are conflicting views on the propriety of such activities, and Corker has never been formally censured.

Of course not. There's a nice little racket going there for more than just him.

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.

A very, very wealthy bad guy.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.