• inshallah2 [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I googled and this article was a top result..

    archive.today • The Murky Past of Congressional Candidate Marcus Flowers | The New Republic

    The war veteran turned politician, who hopes to challenge Marjorie Taylor Greene, has revealed little about his life. We tried to find out why.

    [...]

    It's not clear why he refuses even to name his previous employers—he's mentioned the Department of Defense and Department of State but not any private contractors. That can be fixed now: According to a work history found online and later confirmed by his campaign, Flowers worked for DynCorp, a massive defense contractor that, last year, was purchased by a company called Amentum. He also worked at lesser-known contractors like the Research Triangle Institute and Parsons I&T. (A representative from Amentum refused to comment on whether Flowers ever worked for DynCorp.)

    In the 2000s, Flowers ran his own small firm called Total Logistics Services, or Total Logistics, Inc. Registered in New Orleans and Alabama, the business appears to be defunct. It earned tens of thousands in contracts during the George W. Bush years, largely for translation services performed in Romania.

    Total Logistics Services was also required to pay back thousands of dollars to the Army, for reasons that are unclear in the available online contracting data, but such clawbacks can occur for various reasons, including if not all work is fulfilled. (According to Flowers's campaign, "Total Logistics Services never received any disbursements under any contract that were later paid back.")

    Reached for comment by phone, Katja Wimmer, who's named as a partner in Total Logistics Services' business filings and apparently once shared a home with Flowers, was surprised to learn that Flowers was running for Congress. After agreeing to an interview to take place the next day, Wimmer did not respond to further calls and messages.

    [...]

    [He had a] tumultuous marriage to his ex-wife, a Russian national named Svetlana Chudinova whom he met in Afghanistan.

    [...]

    Friends and former colleagues of Flowers declined to speak on the record. While some of the grim details of Flowers's former marriage have been confirmed by court records, much remains unknown about his personal and work history. It remains exceedingly strange that this deep state–like figure would expect to step into public life without opening his past to scrutiny.

    But if Donald Trump showed anything, it's that today's politicians can get away with far more than one might expect. It just takes some bravado, an indifference to consequence, and an ability tell a compelling story that your audience—in this case, Democratic Party machers hoping that there's a magic kind of candidate who can evict Marjorie Taylor Greene from a deep-red district—wants to believe.

    • riley
      ·
      edit-2
      8 months ago

      deleted by creator

      • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        It's a pretty ordinary Russian surname. In a twist of nominative determinism, Valery Chudinov is a well-known chud and conspirologist, infamous for finding "Old Russian inscriptions" on pretty much everything.

    • Theblarglereflargle [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      it’s that today’s politicians can get away with far more than one might expect. It just takes some bravado, an indifference to consequence, and an ability tell a compelling story

      So in short the Dems cant rely on this at all