The Trump donor and Mar-a-Lago neighbor who got the no-bid contract once pled guilty to bribing a congressman.

The algae blooming across the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool right now is the perfect symbolic representation of the Trump administration, and American history as well, if we’re really being honest. Essentially, covering over problems with a few coats of paint and expecting them to go away, while using the whole thing as an excuse to funnel money to rich allies.

The repaint finished in early June, and within two weeks, the blue coating started peeling off the bottom and floating to the surface while a record algae bloom turned the pool into a swamp. The job was originally estimated at $1.8 million, and the Virginia firm hired to waterproof it, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, has now been paid more than $14.7 million, with the combined cost of the project set to clear $16 million once you add in the second contract.

The second contract went to an Ohio firm, ironically called Greenwater Services, which got $1.74 million to install a “nanobubble” water purification system that was supposed to stop the algae bloom. The New York Times traced the ownership to the J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust, run by a longtime Trump donor named John J. Cafaro, who has given more than $300,000 to Trump-linked political committees and owns a mansion a short walk from Mar-a-Lago. Trump called him a “fantastic man” back in 2016.

He also has a very sketchy history filled with fraud and scammy behavior. In 2001, Cafaro pled guilty to conspiracy to bribe Representative James Traficant, a Democrat from Ohio, after paying $26,000 to fix up Traficant’s houseboat and kicked in cash toward the purchase of the boat itself, in exchange for pushing the FAA into buying laser-guidance technology from an aerospace company he owned.

When they were caught, Cafaro snitched and testified against Traficant for a reduced charge. He walked away with a $150,000 fine and probation, and watched the congressman get convicted on ten felony counts, expelled from the House, and sent to prison. A few years after that first plea, Cafaro was back in court because he funneled an undisclosed $10,000 loan into his daughter Capri’s failed run for Congress and never repaid it. He spent five days in jail when the judge got fed up with his refusal to disclose his own finances, which earned him a $250,000 fine on top of the probation.

The family fortune comes from building shopping malls across Ohio, and nearly every time Cafaro wandered off into something else, whether it was a motor company or the aerospace outfit that landed him in front of a grand jury, the venture collapsed.

This is the man the federal government decided to hand a massive no-bid contract to. The Park Service justified skipping competition by citing an emergency exemption, claiming there was no time to take other offers because the work had to be finished for the 250th.

When the Interior Department was asked about all this, spokesperson Katie Martin said Greenwater was chosen because it had “the expertise, workforce and materials” to finish on time, and the department added that it had no idea about Cafaro’s political support when the contract went out. However, with paint already rising to the surface and the pool greener than ever, that expertise is coming into question.

For all the talk about “waste, fraud and abuse” that is often used to discredit programs that actually help people, there is little mention of the fact that inflated government contracts are regularly given to friends, families and donors of politicians. The same crowd that built its entire brand on screaming about government waste and corrupt insiders just spent $16 million repainting a pool for a birthday party, handed a chunk of it to a career scammer, and didn’t accomplish anything.

Article posted with permission from John Vibes