RICHMOND — The government’s star witness against Bob and Maureen McDonnell took the stand Wednesday, detailing a lavish shopping afternoon with the former first lady and telling a jury that he wrote checks for the couple because he needed the governor’s help.
Former Star Scientific CEO Jonnie R. Williams Sr. said he wanted the credibility of McDonnell’s office to help launch one of his products. He also wanted state research hospitals to take a hard look at its health benefits.
As Williams worked the first family for support, he said, Maureen McDonnell poured out the sad state of the couple’s finances. She told him bankruptcy was an option, then asked for a $50,000 loan and another $15,000 to cover reception bills at a daughter’s wedding.
Williams said he complied because, ” I needed (the governor’s) help.”
“This was a business relationship,” he said.
A day earlier, Maureen McDonnell’s attorneys said Mrs. McDonnell had a “crush” on Williams and that Williams had lavished time, attention and gifts on her while her marriage was decaying.
Williams’ testimony came at the end of a busy day in the McDonnells’ federal trial on corruption charges. Jerri Fulkerson, his long-time assistant, testified in the morning to a pattern: Someone in the McDonnell family, or on the governor or first lady’s staff, would ask to use Williams’ jet, or for some other sort of help.
Williams would say yes.
At one point, Williams said he took a commercial flight to California just so he could fly on his own jet with the governor, who was borrowing it.
“I think it’s become common practice in Virginia,” he testified. “You want to make sure that you have access to (politicians), and the airplane accomplishes that.”
Fulkerson testified that Williams also lent his plane to former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as well as former Virginia Attorney Generals Ken Cuccinelli and Jerry Kilgore. Under questioning from the McDonnell defense, she acknowledged that Williams gave expensive gifts to many people, but she said none of them requested plane rides for their children, and that Williams never gave them five-figure loans, as he did the McDonnells.
One of the McDonnells’ twin sons, Bobby, also took the stand Wednesday. Prosecutors walked him through the high-dollar golf rounds that Williams covered for the McDonnell boys, as well as a gift golf bag and clubs that just showed up one day at the governor’s mansion, courtesy of Williams.
Bobby McDonnell said he thought of Williams as a mentor, and that Williams never asked for help pitching his father.
Williams has only begun his testimony, and will continue with the prosecution’s questions Thursday morning. Then the defense gets a crack at him.
The McDonnells’ attorneys say Williams is a liar, and that he shifted his story repeatedly to win immunity. That protects him, not just in this case, but in a shady $10 million stock deal investigators had been poking around, defense attorneys have said.
The McDonnells’ attorneys have also said that Maureen McDonnell developed “a crush” on the wealthy businessman when he filled a void left by a broken marriage and the governor’s busy schedule. They said the couple’s finances weren’t as bad as the prosecution suggests.
The McDonnells maintain they broke no laws, saying they accepted Williams’ largesse but never crossed the line that divides modern politics and routine business promotion from outright bribery. They face a potential maximum prison sentence of decades if convicted.
Williams testified Wednesday that Maureen McDonnell didn’t explicitly promise her husband’s help when she asked for checks. Instead she told him that she had a lot of experience with nutritional supplements – a breast cancer scare as a teenager sparked her interest – and that she could help with his company’s latest product, a tobacco derivative called Anatabloc.
“I can be helpful to you with this,” Williams quoted her as saying. “The governor says it’s OK for me to help you, but I need you to help me.”
Williams said he believed Anatabloc could help prevent inflamatory diseases. He testified that he tested its key component on his wife, convincing a doctor to delay thyroid surgery to see if the compound worked. It did, and she recovered from thyroid disease without surgery, he said.
Testimony from Williams’ assistant made him sound like a virtual ATM for the McDonnell family. He covered travel costs, lent his brother’s condominium and provided Ritz Carlton beach club passes when daughter Rachel McDonnell wanted to go to Florida with a friend, Fulkerson said.
He also lent her his white Range Rover and arranged a yachting trip on a boat owned by one of his partners, she said.
He covered flights to Savannah, Georgia, for two McDonnell daughters so they could attend a bachelorette party for their sister, Fulkerson said. Then he gave daughter Jeanine McDonnell and her new husband $10,000 and first-class honeymoon air tickets as a wedding gift, she testified.
When the McDonnells vacationed at Williams’ large Smith Mountain lake house, Fulkerson said she arranged for a Star Scientific employee to drive Williams’ Ferrari to the house for the governor’s use. Star Scientific spent more than $600 so the employee could catch a limousine ride home, she said.
Bobby McDonnell testified Wednesday that the McDonnell children asked their father to drive the car because they thought it would be funny.
Defense attorneys didn’t delve deeply into these trips, but did show that the Cuccinelli family also used Williams’ lake house from time to time. They also zeroed in on flights and lunches that Williams apparently shared with Mary Shea Southerland, who was Maureen McDonnell’s chief of staff.
During Tuesday’s opening arguments, defense lawyers suggested that Williams swept Southerland and Maureen McDonnell off their feet, and that both were excited to help him pitch Anatabloc.
Williams and Maureen McDonnell exchanged more than 1,200 text messages and phone calls over 15 months in 2011 and 2012, prosecutors have said. Southerland was hoping to get a job with Williams, according to court documents filed in this case, but not yet before the jury.
As for the former first couple, Fulkerson testified that they were such an integral part to one trip – to Bar Harbor, Maine – that it was cancelled when they couldn’t come. Shortly thereafter, the governor’s mansion hosted a launch event for Anatabloc.
Williams took Maureen McDonnell and Southerland on a shopping spree in New York. They hit high-dollar stores “for hours,” Williams said, and he bought Maureen McDonnell some $20,000 worth of clothing and accessories.
Federal prosecutors have also said Williams bought a Rolex watch for the governor, which Maureen McDonnell gave him as a Christmas gift. Bobby McDonnell testified Wednesday that he suspected the watch was a fake.
Fulkerson also testified about checks and wire transfers that she handled between Williams and the McDonnells. She said she had to write one $50,000 check – for a loan to Bob McDonnell’s real estate company – three times, she testified.
The first two times she wrote “Maureen McDonnell” in the memo lines, and Williams asked her to change that, she testified.
The defense targeted Fulkerson’s credibility, though. She acknowledged signing Williams’ name on a number of documents – always at his direction, she said – then notarizing those documents as if he had signed them himself.
Fulkerson could face prosecution for this, but she struck a deal with prosecutors so that her testimony in this trial can’t be used against her.
