Old land deal quietly haunts Mick Mulvaney as he serves as Trump's chief of staff

By Michael Kranish January 14 at 7:39 PM

INDIAN LAND, S.C. — Mick Mulvaney was a young businessman and budding politician 11 years ago when he became co-owner of a company that wanted to build a strip mall near a busy intersection in this upscale bedroom community outside Charlotte. All that was needed was money.

The company cobbled together the financing — which included borrowing $1.4 million from a family firm owned by a prominent local businessman named Charles Fonville Sr., according to court records and interviews.

Eventually, the project fell apart. The mall never got built. And Mulvaney moved on, building a political career as a firebrand fiscal hawk and tea party pioneer in Congress who railed against out-of-control government deficits — eventually rising a few weeks ago to be President Trump’s acting chief of staff.

Fonville, however, said his company has not received the $2.5 million with interest that he said it is owed. In explaining the debt to a Senate committee during his 2017 confirmation hearing, Mulvaney cast it as a casualty of a bad real estate deal, saying the sum “will go unpaid.”

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/old-land-deal-quietly-haunts-mick-mulvaney-as-he-serves-as-trumps-chief-of-staff/2019/01/14/e1d3cd72-07b8-11e9-a3f0-71c95106d96a_story.html