Chelsea Clinton’s mother-in-law is drawing unwanted attention now that Hillary Clinton is gearing up to run for president.
Marjorie Margolies — a former Pennsylvania congresswoman and the mother of Chelsea’s investment-banker husband, Marc Mezvinsky — has been running Women’s Campaign International (WCI) since 1998. The charity aims to help women win elections in Third World countries.
Now that Margolies is campaigning to win back her old congressional seat, Philadelaphia blogger Laura Goldman scoured public financial filings and discovered Margolies paid herself an unusually large salary, part of which came from taxpayer dollars.
Some Democrats in the Keystone State are surprised Margolies is running at all, given that her husband, politician Edward Mezvinsky, was indicted in 2001 and later pleaded guilty to 31 of 69 fraud charges. Nearly $10 million was involved in the crimes. The couple divorced in 2007 while he was still in prison. (Both remain unmarried.) “It would be like Ruth Madoff running for office,” Goldman said.
Goldman isn’t sure exactly what WCI does besides raising money and honoring influential Democrats, such as Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, Tina Brown, Olympia Snowe and, most recently, Chelsea Clinton. “I know they spent $26,000 on a conference in Italy,” Goldman said.
Margolies, an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, collected a WCI salary as high as $164,159 in 2011.
Ken Smukler, a spokesman for Margolies, attacked Goldman for cherry-picking numbers “for the purposes of creating the false impression that Marjorie has somehow used WCI to line her pockets.” Some years, Margolies was paid less than $60,000.
Hillary might be thinking, “What difference does it make?”