The Chef Who Brought Down Bob McDonnell

One of the ironies of Bob McDonnell's tremendous fall is that the match that lit what became a legal inferno was the decision to try to crucify the former chef at the governor's mansion.  Todd Schneider is the one that first talked to the feds and set them on the trail of McDonnell and Maureen "Marie Antoinette" McDonnell.  Talk about pay backs being Hell.  It is also noteworthy that again Maureen McDonnell seems to have been the one that fanned the flames.  The Washingtonian has a lengthy story that looks at Schneider's tell all statements.  Here are excerpts:

You don’t have to remind Bob McDonnell who Schneider is. Before Virginia’s 71st governor got crossways with his onetime executive chef, McDonnell was the Great Republican Hope. His win in 2009 snapped a four-year losing streak for the GOP in statewide elections, and after taking power in 2010 he wasted no time establishing himself as a conservative who could cut deals with Democrats. Mitt Romney considered him for the vice-presidential ticket in 2012, and pundits called him a credible contender for the White House in 2016.

Today the McDonnell brand is toast.

What began with some groceries missing from the governor’s kitchen has snowballed into the biggest—and most unlikely—political scandal to hit Virginia in decades.

And it all started with the man sitting in front of me: Todd Schneider, the chef who took down the governor. A man with a checkered past of his own.

“You have to remember,” Schneider told me, “everybody talks in the kitchen.”

the most powerful force in the executive mansion wasn’t the back-slapping governor or his outspoken AG—it was the first lady. 

Schneider says he became especially close with Maureen, a former Redskins cheerleader from Fairfax County. She spent so much time in the kitchen that he kept a barstool around so she could have a glass of wine and relax as they talked. Maureen had few friends and was lonely in the mansion, Schneider says. “I didn’t ask for this job,” she told him.

Although Maureen could be charming and fun, he says she had a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” personality. For one thing, she insisted the house be kept just so—if a bed wasn’t made to her satisfaction, the first lady would untidy the sheets so the maids had to start over. And Maureen infuriated the mansion staff by ordering employees to run her personal errands at all hours, Schneider says. He received text messages from her as late as 2 AM instructing him to fetch everything from liquor to tampons, and he’d be “browbeaten” for returning without the exact items she demanded, he says.

The staff grew to despise the governor’s wife; several maids quit and the butler refused to speak to her, Schneider says. Employees eventually drafted a letter to McDonnell threatening to resign en masse if their treatment didn’t improve. “Bottom line is she had issues,” the chef says.

The McDonnell children who didn’t live at the mansion removed “cases and cases” of Gatorade, soda, and bottled water from the kitchen, Schneider says. When the family’s twin sons moved out of their dorm at the University of Virginia, the first lady helped herself to mansion supplies in order to furnish their apartment, he says. “I’d be like, ‘I’m missing half my pots and pans.’ ”

He saw one daughter take drinking glasses with the state seal on them, while another left with boxes of unused trash bags. According to Schneider, she said, “Why should I pay for it?”

“Those people, they just had their hands in the cookie jar the whole time,” he says.

[I]n June 2011, Schneider’s company catered the wedding of one of the McDonnells’ daughters in the mansion’s garden. “They all drank and got drunk like crazy,” he says. The family was having so much fun that Maureen asked to extend the reception. Later, she refused to pick up the extra costs, Schneider says, and she never tipped the staff.

By now, everyone in Virginia knows the McDonnells didn’t end up spending a dime on the jumbo shrimp or London broil the 200 guests were served; it was Williams who paid the $15,000 bill.

Schneider overheard other staffers speculating that McDonnell’s relationship with Williams might not be aboveboard, and the chef was already concerned that goods were being lifted from the kitchen. “There was just too much weird stuff,” he says. He brought his concerns to the mansion director and the first lady’s chief of staff. “They said, ‘Cover your butt, Todd.’ ”

Schneider began documenting everything. He took cell-phone pictures of anything he thought looked fishy and made sure to preserve Williams’s wedding check to his catering company. “If they ever come after me, I’m going to sing like a canary,” the chef recalls telling the mansion director.

On February 10, 2012, a loud banging on Schneider’s door jolted him awake. Two men were on his porch: “I thought, ‘Why are there salesmen at my door at 7:30 in the morning?’ ”  But this wasn’t a sales call.  Someone had called an anonymous tip in to a state hotline for waste, fraud, and abuse and claimed that Schneider had stolen food from the governor’s mansion. Now the FBI and state police were at the chef’s door, ready to question him.

Schneider wasn’t concerned. There was a simple explanation for everything, he said.  In addition to cooking the first family’s meals, Virginia’s executive chef is expected to cater official events at the mansion. But the house didn’t always have enough linens, silverware, or chairs, Schneider says. When he came up short on supplies, he’d order them from his company and bill the state.

Unconventional though the arrangement may sound, Schneider’s story holds up—court documents substantiate it. The chef told the agents who came to his house that he’d carted off mansion food, but only as part of this barter agreement. When they left later that morning, he figured the matter was settled.

It’s unclear why Cuccinelli went ahead with the case, knowing the chef had the goods on the governor. “I think they thought that by [indicting me] it would shut me up,” the chef says. “It didn’t.”

In the coming months, the dirt came out. After the state refused to drop the charges against Schneider, all the petty details—the free wedding reception, the Rolex, the pilfered water bottles—found their way into the Washington Post and other newspapers from Richmond to DC.

In September 2013—when Cuccinelli had just weeks to go until the election—the state allowed Schneider to plead no contest to two misdemeanor counts of embezzlement. He was spared jail time and was ordered to repay the value of the goods he admitted taking.  The whopping total: $2,300.

[T]he thrust of his allegations of wrongdoing in the mansion is substantiated by records—records now in the hands of federal investigators.  Because of Todd Schneider, Bob McDonnell is not going to the White House.