Government For Sale--Special Interests

Mike Lair, a Republican candidate for the open Seventh District House Seat and father-in-law to former Blunt bagman James Harris, paid more than $23,000 to his wife from the coffers of a Federally funded education grant program of which he was the director over the last four years, according to official documents.  These payments, supplemented by regular reimbursement of travel per diem costs paid to Ms. Lair, represent a clear violation of financial standards promulgated by the United States Office of Management and Budget and raise serious concerns that Mike Lair violated federal law.

In 2004, the Chillicothe RII School District applied for and was awarded a federal grant for a program called Teaching Traditional American History.  The grant application, on which Mike Lair --a Cillicothe history teacher-- was listed as the program director, asked for more than $892,000 in federal Department of Education funds to finance a program geared toward continuing education of history teachers in northwest Missouri.

On that grant application, Lair described a number of positions that would be hired to help administer the program, including one position titled "promotional assistant."  Though Lair included lengthy curricula vitae for a number of academics who would be involved in the project in various capacities he curiously made no mention of and provided no work history for any individual who would fill the "promotional assistant" role.  This was apparently out of fear that someone might take objection to what was obviously his plan: the hiring of his own wife to do a "job" that would be paid with federal funds administered by him.

Documents provided by the Chillicothe RII School District (see page 19) demonstrate that Mike Lair, under the auspices of the federal education grant program which he was being paid (some $30,000 annually) to administer, was paying thousands of dollars each year to his wife.  From September 2004 through at least May of this year, Jeanne M. Lair was paid $500 monthly out of federal grant money allocated to the school district for the project.  Over that period, Ms. Lair raked in $23,500 in pay that, presumably, she would never had received had her husband Mike Lair not been program director for the federal grant project.