Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, who is currently campaigning for re-election, is under fire by GOP Senators for her alleged ties to the Clinton’s, as well as her past track record as a senator.

McCaskill is currently facing a shrinking base in her native state of Missouri, showing her losing to one Republican challenger, Josh Howley, in an average of three polls. Polling data from The Morning Consult shows McCaskill’s popularity has dropped 8 points during 2017, bringing her net rating to a split zero.

In this election year, past controversies have begun to resurface in an attempt to discredit the embattled, weary and vulnerable senator. In some cases, the controversies and scandals that were seemingly a thing of the past may be too big to ignore, especially in a time of anti-corruption sentiment taking power in Washington D.C.

McCaskill was a target of an ethics complaint in the last few months into her term as Auditor of Missouri. The complaint was filed by the Missouri Republican State Committee on behalf of the Committee of Ethics, concerned about McCaskill’s sealing of her financial records from disclosure.

A 11 page document found on Scribd, posted by user “Darin Reboot Congress”, details the Committee’s concern about McCaskill’s ignorance of repeated request to disclose financial records not only for herself, but for her family as well.

The document alleges the following:

“Ms. McCaskill has failed to provide even the bare minimum information regarding her family’s assets, income and liabilities, and where such information is provided at all, in many instances, it is still incomplete and is not in compliance with Senate Ethics Rules and the federal law governing financial disclosure. The complexities of Ms. McCaskill’s family holdings are more pronounced than usual because of the deliberately complicated manner in which her family’s business holdings are constructed.”

The committee further demanded the following information to review:

Disclosure of Parcels of Real Estate

Disclosure of All Government Issued Tax Credit

Valuation of Real Estate Assets by her and her spouse.

Disclosure of ALL Liabilities.

Disclosure of all information under law.

The complaint targeted only one of McCaskill’s assets, Festus Garden Apartments, which had been cited in the letter for the following issues:

Overlapping Ownership in filing papers and documents.

Application and receipts of Missouri Housing Development Commission funding, loans and other financials.

Liabilities and Debt reports

The value of the property

Failure to report income to the state.

Festus Garden Apartments, located in Festus, Missouri, is a low-income housing project to provide housing for the low-income of St. Louis and other surrounding towns, or rather commonly known as Section-8 housing. This provides housing for those in poverty or in low-income families.

During the investigation into Festus Garden Apartment’s financials and dealings, an exhibit was presented alongside the ethics complaint against McCaskill. At this time McCaskill was married to Businessman Joseph Shepard, who was already an issue sin the 2004 gubernatorial election in Missouri, when $1.6 Million was wired into his wife’s campaign.

The first notable Exhibit, being labeled “B” showed partnerships between Festus Gardens and other companies that aligned with Festus and may have given them financials to conduct projects.

The agent registered to Festus Associates and GP was a person by the name of Kenneth M. Vitor, who established both entities in 2003, according to documents within the exhibit.

However, it was revealed that two companies, Capstone Development Group LLC, and Lockwood Development Company LLC was represented by the same agent, Mr. Vitor, but was also organized by McCaskill’s husband in 1995, which could have resulted in conflicts of interest, since Capstone was a housing developer; Lockwood was a real-estate company that buys, sells or rents land; and Festus Associates organized transactions and the Gardens low-income housing area.

What is interesting, however, is that Capstone had no official documents certifying transactions or their own establishment, potentially hinting that when Lockwood had enough money from Real-Estate, the company switch focused to take advantage of a booming Section-8 development market, especially in the St. Louis area.

Shepard, being an organizer, lobbied for contracts for Lockwood to construct and own properties that were in highly populated areas in need of affordable housing.

As a result, three years later, several companies got control of contracts to construct housing development projects in areas in and around Festus and St. Louis.

Essentially, this confirms that Vitor and Shepard were profiting off of affordable housing developments and real estate, and somehow McCaskill failed to report her share in the companies involved in 2006, two years after projects were announced.

In addition, it seemed that Shepard had used funds that were received by venture and federal means to gain capital on projects that benefited the lower-income of Missouri in exchange for contracts and other money-making schemes.

In addition, Shepard owned two more entities, the Missouri Tax Credit Fund and the Missouri Equity Investors LLC, both of which who are firms who receive and distribute money for projects. However, in the case of the Financial Disclosure form, these funds were not appropriately addressed.

Plus, the creditors listed seem to focus on all section-8 housing agencies and development / real estate companies:

In the Festus Associates filings, the company failed to disclose creditors and other info as to whom received money or who had paid or been paid by the company:

There are several other documents that fail to provide debtors, creditors and other info that is relevant, potentially from being linked back to certain tanks that receive funds from the government, such as the Missouri Tax Credit Fund.

In Exhibit C of the ethics complaint, There are some issues in which McCaskill fails to disclose certain assets she had held for years at a time. In some cases, some of the assets she holds are debtors to her businessman husband, who was profiting generously from the markets.

McCaskill also has private assets that are debtors to her Husband’s agencies, such as:

Cambridge Associates

Savannah Senior Apartments

Moberly Associates II

Missouri Investors

AG Limited

Lockwood Ventures

Kansas Rural Housing

Centralia Associates

And over a thousand other assets that garner large amounts of cash to the investor and the owners of the companies.

(Exhibit E)

McCaskill had owned these assets for over 15+ years, in some cases, and failed to disclose them once by keeping them under wraps. Some of these were purchased during David Exposito’s marriage, which comes into play later.

Focusing back on the core, However, in a document that was found in the archives of the Washington Post, there was a filing of McCaskill’s 2007 financial disclosure report that documents all of McCaskill’s holdings, not limited to Missouri.

In a 2015 valuation on OpenSecrets, McCaskill was worth around $61 million on a salary of $97,000 being in the Senate. Most of that money came from real estate, nearly pulling in $20,000,000. In 2007, her net worth was around $32,000,000.

However, in these documents, the sum of her holdings, in income terms, does not come anywhere close to that $32,000,000 mark, in terms of real-estate:

Most of these assets are held by her husband, Joseph Shepard, especially those in Missouri. But her assets also extend out to other low-income or poverty-stricken areas such as:

St Louis, MO

Rural and poor areas of Missouri

Florida

Tennessee

Kansas

Georgia

Wellington, New Zealand (Fisher Funds)

Illinois

New Mexico

Oklahoma

These affordable income housing projects accounted for over 80% of McCaskill’s profile. Why is this of concern? Considering that all of these were limited partnerships potentially sets up major conflicts of interest due to the fact that some assets were found to have been debtors to Shepard’s Tax Credit fund in Missouri.

It is also important to note that Fisher Funds for McCaskill was valued at over $1,000,000, considering that this was not a U.S. fund, but rather a New Zealand Fund.

McCaskill had also bought several Trust Funds, Investment Funds, and index Portfolios, totaling over $8 million in Transactions. However, McCaskill was still owner of a line of credit from Enterprise Bank in Saint Louis for over $1,000,000.

Some of these purchases included:

A Loan Bank

A Credit Bank

Multiple Investment Funds around $250,000 to $500,000 a piece.

Several Stock portfolios of the S&P 500, as well as real-estate portfolios of certain companies.

And other sales and transactions of interest.

However, an interesting event happened nearly one year prior to this info being picked up and reported on by the media.

On December 12th, 2005, David Exposito, McCaskill’s ex-husband, was shot numberout times in the torso, pushed out of a moving vehicle and was left for dead as the vehicle sped off.

The vehicle was later found with gold rims missing off of the car, which caused the police to assume that it was a reckless homicide for the rims. However, many assumed that it was a hit job considering that it was a bizarre way to die, and the fact that Exposito may have been aware of early purchases by McCaskill.

The couple divorced in 1995 after Exposito was caught smoking marijuana, in which McCaskill quickly remarried to Shepard.

Shortly after this was found by the Associated Press, as well as the Washington Post, Joseph Shepard granted an interview with the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, which stated the following:

Republicans say McCaskill misled the public by saying Shepard was out of the business in 2004. Records show he still received $3 million in rent from nursing home companies that year. The GOP says the auditor should have hired an independent firm to audit the regulatory unit that licenses nursing homes.McCaskill contends she has no conflict. Her audit, which is under way, doesn’t overlap with any period of time when her husband operated nursing homes, she said. He still owns a building that contains a nursing home in Moberly, Mo. Republicans also say McCaskill shouldn’t audit the Missouri Housing Development Commission. They contend Shepard still benefits from subsidies because a Georgia company that bought a Shepard development received a government loan. Shepard laughs at the allegation.“You’re telling me I can’t even sell them? What should I do? Bomb them?” Shepard’s maze of businesses could include an offshore tax shelter, Republicans say. They point to McCaskill’s disclosure statement, which lists an interest in the Rural Housing Re-Insurance Co. of America Ltd., located in Bermuda

However, this is not the first time this is being pointed out. In 2012, the National Legal and Policy Center published a scathing report about Shepard’s links to projects that received nearly $20 Million in federal funds.

The report states the following:

The NLPC analysis released today showed more than $20 million in financial benefits from the federal stimulus law to real estate projects associated with McCaskill’s husband, with all of the $20 million benefitting projects different than those identified by the Associated Press story…. ….None of the six real estate projects identified by NLPC as receiving over $20 million in federal stimulus funds were listed on McCaskill’s Financial Disclosure Reports or covered by the AP analysis. According to McCaskill’s Financial Disclosure Reports, MTCF was listed as having an asset value of over $1 million in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Asset values are reported in broad ranges with “Over $1,000,000” being the highest category. Therefore, it is possible that the asset value of MTCF is much larger than $1,000,000. In 2008, prior to the stimulus law, officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in 2009, MTCF was listed by McCaskill as having an asset value of “$500,000 to $1,000,000.” The lucrative nature of this asset is underscored by McCaskill’s Financial Disclosure Reports showing “over $1,000,000” in income for each of the years 2009, 2010 and 2011. Since this category is the highest listed in the Senate Financial Disclosure Reports, it is likely that the annual income from MTCF to Senator McCaskill’s husband’s business was higher than $1,000,000 in each of those years.

Even though the Associated Press could not definitively confirm if the money had been rerouted from McCaskill to her Husband, it may have been influenced by McCaskill’s votes on funding for Housing and Agriculture departments, which provide subsidiaries for housing for construction.

However, we know that Shepard and McCaskill got rich off of robbing the poor from “affordable housing” to potentially fuel a senate run at the expense of the remaining finances of the poor, added to the net worth of her family, potentially shipped it to that New Zealand fund, and got rich.

The funds may have also been connected to McCaskill’s private plane fiasco, where it was reported that she had misused taxpayer funds to purchase a plane and possibly go on luxury trips as Auditor and Senator. The plane’s earliest trip was reported to have been in 2006, the same time the audit on her finances was occurring.

The plane was also bought in July of 2006, mere days before the ethics committee launched the investigation. However, the ethics report mentions nothing about the plane or her transactions before the audit occurred.

It is also reported that McCaskill billed Missouri Taxpayers $1,220.44 for a trip in 2007. It is possible that some of the funds garnered from her Real-Estate holdings may have allowed her to purchase this plane, as well as a hanger and slice of an airfield.

The GOP in Missouri launched a complaint in 2011 about the plane, in which McCaskill promptly sold the plane for a $200,000 loss, claiming she wanted to get rid of “the damn plane.”

It is not known at this time whether other funds have been used for other leisurely purposes, political trips, favors or other personal means. There is a strong indication that there are some assets that have been transferred to that New Zealand fund or others that are still masked under shell companies, but there is no concrete proof to support this.

However, it is clear that McCaskill had lied about her financial status and holdings in order to receive federal funds for the government that may have been misused for political and personal purposes.