You have to love how the rules simply do not apply to Democrats, especially in the case of Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
A report about an ethics waiver given to the wife of Pelosi’s nephew is now blowing up.
Talking Points…
- The waiver
- Protect the Public’s Trust responds
- Analysis
Pelosi appears to be bending the rules just a bit to help out a family member. Laurence Pelosi is the nephew of Nancy Pelosi. He reportedly held a stake in a joint project with Goldman Sachs that was called Restore Utah. This project was receiving HUD Section 8 housing vouchers.
Laurence’s wife, Alexis, works for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), so under normal circumstances, his project would not have been permitted to receive a HUD grant due to the clear conflict of interest. However, Restore Utah received a waiver to approve the release of funds, and I think we all know why.
Watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust started digging into this to find out why Pelosi was able to get the conflict of interest waiver. According to the waiver documentation, that waiver was granted because it would have resulted in “undue hardship” for the Pelosis if they had not been given that waiver. According to company documentation, Laurence has a stake in Restore Utah for somewhere between $2 and $10 million, so you can see how he is likely to fall on hard times.
This administration, and I am sure most administrations, has given dozens of waivers like this. It is all part of the game for donors, family, and friends to be paid back for their loyalty to politicians. PPT director Michael Chamberlain responded to this particular waiver, stating:
“It’s good to be Beltway royalty. 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.”
It turns out Laurence was named the co-lead of Crow Holdings Renewables in June 2023. The timing of this is rather suspect because it happened right around the same time his wife was named a climate adviser for HUD. That little tidbit was not listed on Alexis Pelosi’s financial disclosure forms. Chamberlain noted:
“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.”
On top of all this, Alexis Pelosi attended a dinner in DC that was hosted by Enterprise Community Partners. Guess who paid for the dinner? That would be Crow Holdings, where, again, Pelosi received a waiver that allowed her husband’s company to pick up the $300 tab for the event. Chamberlain commented:
“It certainly makes one wonder whether HUD would have gone to such lengths to accommodate an official whose family name was not ‘Pelosi.’
“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.”
While Pelosi is the subject of this report, you could probably substitute the name of dozens of other politicians on both sides of the aisle who are doing the same thing regularly. The entire system is corrupt, and it stopped being about the American people a long time ago.
