Nancy Pelosi’s Relative Snags Sweetheart Conflict Of Interest Waiver From Feds
- September 11, 2024
Robert Schmad, Daily Caller
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in January 2022 approved an ethics waiver for the wife of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s nephew allowing for a potential financial conflict of interest to go unresolved, according to documents obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.c
Laurence Pelosi, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s nephew, had a stake in a joint real estate venture with Goldman Sachs called Restore Utah, which benefits from HUD’s Section 8 housing vouchers, while his wife, Alexis Pelosi, was employed at the agency, according to a copy of the waiver approval released by watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust.
While it would usually violate federal ethics rules for a beneficiary of HUD funds to have a spouse employed at the department, HUD found an exemption that allowed Laurence to retain his stake in the real estate project. Requiring him to divest, or his project to forgo HUD funds, would allegedly result in “undue hardship” for Alexis and her husband.
Part of HUD’s reasoning was that Restore Utah was Laurence Pelosi’s “primary profession,” however, Alexis Pelosi’s financial disclosures indicate that he had four other income streams around the time the conflict of interest waiver was approved. Laurence Pelosi collected salaries from two different law firms and consulting fees from two other law firms in 2022.
“It’s good to be Beltway royalty,” PPT director Michael Chamberlain told the DNCF. “Ethics officials certainly seemed to go out of their way to find a justification for her. Waivers should be rare and limited to unique circumstances for uniquely qualified individuals. As we’ve seen, the Biden-Harris administration appears to have a different philosophy, consistently appointing conflicted individuals to powerful posts and then using waivers to magically make those conflicts disappear.”
The Biden-Harris administration granted over dozens ethics waivers for bureaucrats, according to a running tracker maintained by PPT.
“What a tremendous stroke of luck for Laurence to have nailed down the senior manager for renewables gig for a real estate firm when, coincidentally, his wife was a senior climate advisor at HUD in the Biden-Harris administration, which brags of doling out hundreds of billions of dollars for renewables,” Chamberlain told the DCNF.
“It certainly makes one wonder whether HUD would have gone to such lengths to accommodate an official whose family name was not ‘Pelosi,’” Chamberlain said in a press release obtained by the DCNF. “However, it is in keeping with the Biden-Harris administration’s practice of appointing highly conflicted individuals to powerful positions, then simply brushing away the conflicts with waivers. Little wonder that, despite their claims to be the most ethical administration in history, the public’s trust in the federal government continues to nosedive.”