HUD Ethics Office Searches Far and Wide to Justify Pelosi Family Ethics Thicket

Beltway royalty has its privileges.

It’s good to be Beltway royalty, even if it’s only by marriage. Laurence Pelosi is a real estate developer in a joint venture with Goldman Sachs called Restore Utah. And he’s the nephew of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Restore Utah buys and rehabs low-income housing in the Beehive State. Laurence’s wife Alexis is now a senior climate advisor at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Restore Utah receives HUD Section 8-subsidized rents from some of its tenants. Under a HUD ethics regulation, receipt of money from Section 8 by a HUD employee or a spouse is strictly forbidden. For most couples this might be a problem. But a waiver request signed by a Pelosi seems to bring out the best in government bureaucrats.

According to documents obtained by Protect the Public’s Trust, HUD Deputy General Counsel for Operations Gayle Bohling, the Designated Agency Ethics Official, responded with initiative and creativity. Ms. Bohling approved Ms. Pelosi’s waiver request “after giving this matter careful consideration.” She found another ethics rule that allowed her to “waive these restrictions in cases of undue hardship … Restore Utah is your husband’s primary profession, it would be impractical and an undue hardship for your husband to divest from the business or prohibit the business from renting to Section 8 tenants.”

It would be undue hardship for Laurence Pelosi to give up his joint venture with a Wall Street giant (with whom, as Ms. Bohling herself noted, he was raising “$35 million for a new fund to acquire additional multifamily properties.”) Perhaps he doesn’t get paid much by his other four sources of income reported on Alexis Pelosi’s initial financial disclosure, nor by his other gig at the massive real estate firm Crow Holdings, with which he has been affiliated since 2019. That might be why his wife, the Senior Climate Advisor, did not request a waiver for the potential conflict of interest represented by Crow, nor does it appear on that initial financial disclosure as an employer or client of her husband. Amazingly enough, Mr. Pelosi just happened to move into the Senior Manager for Renewables (green energy) job at Crow after his wife became HUD’s senior climate advisor. What a coincidence!

Ms. Pelosi even received approval to attend a dinner event with her husband paid for by Crow. The event’s host was Enterprise Community Partners (ECP), an NGO that awards a significant amount of Section 4 HUD grants. It received $32 million from HUD to award housing development corporations and related organizations. Ms. Pelosi’s connections to ECP weren’t limited to those obtained through her husband, however. Her calendar records show that a couple weeks prior to seeking approval to attend the dinner she participated in a Zoom meeting with ECP, a meeting she did not disclose when seeking the dinner approval. This was merely one of several meetings she had with ECP, including one with its CEO, a former Obama administration HUD secretary.

Of course, as PPT has extensively chronicled, amazing waivers are standard operating procedure in the Biden-Harris administration. But being in a royal family can’t hurt.

“It certainly makes one wonder whether HUD would have gone to such lengths to accommodate an official whose family name was not ‘Pelosi,’” PPT Director Michael Chamberlain said. “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.”

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