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Elaine Chao, former secretary of labor under President George W. Bush and current spouse of Sen. Mitch McConnell, has been trying to help her husband's campaign.

It's not going great.

Yahoo News reported Friday that Chao was on the board of an organization that gave millions to anti-coal environmentalists. She's also been criticized for appearing in an ad that "oversimplifies" her husband's work to end violence against women.

A key part of McConnell's attacks against his opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, is that she's anti-coal, a big liability in a big coal state like Kentucky. But as Yahoo New's Chris Moody pointed out Friday, the war on coal is being fought much closer to home — Chao is on the board of Bloomberg Philanthropies, an organization that invested $50 million in the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" initiative in 2011. The Sierra Club has taken action against 16 coal plants in Kentucky.

Chao joined the board in 2012. Depending on one's interpretation, that means she joined after the decision was made to support the Sierra Club, or that she joined despite an earlier decision to invest in the Sierra Club. "Sen. McConnell has a longstanding, principled record of defending coal families and jobs," a McConnell spokesman told Yahoo News. "Decisions made by a board before Sec. Chao ever joined do not change that."