Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has been in the news of late. After a fall in Luxembourg and subsequent hip replacement surgery, the speaker emerita, as she's been known since 2022, is the subject of inquiries about her financial wealth. The most significant of these appeared on Dec. 18 in RealClearInvestigations (RCI).
Rep. Pelosi and her husband, Paul, are investors in the swank Napa Valley resort known as Auberge du Soleil. The property "rarely turned a significant profit," according to Leighton Woodhouse of RCI, who dug into Mrs. Pelosi's financial disclosure information and found that "In 2021, Pelosi's ethics forms show that her family's income from the resort surged to a range of $1 million to $5 million."
The Pelosi Money Machine
How did this happen? Woodhouse found Auberge du Soleil "received about $9 million from a series of special taxpayer-funded emergency relief programs." This does not necessarily mean Pelosi violated any ethics rules, nor does it mean she did anything illegal. Still, it does help to explain a considerable uptick in her wealth, which jumped from "approximately $18 million in 1991 to nearly $250 million last year," according to the RCI article.
This news comes at a time when President Joe Biden went on record with what many considered to be a swipe at the Pelosi family. In discussing a congressional stock trading ban during an interview on the YouTube channel "More Perfect Union," the 46th president asserted, "I think we should be changing the law...at the federal level [so] that nobody in the Congress should be able to make money in the stock market while they're in the Congress."
It didn't take long for the media to connect the dots. "She [Pelosi] came under scrutiny in 2022 after her husband made $5.3 million off Alphabet options before a House panel considered antitrust actions against the Google parent company," according to an article in Newsweek. For the record, the former House speaker has denied allegations that her husband profited from any information from her and previously "pointed out that her husband's options were set to expire the same day he exercised them," Newsweek reported.
All Attempts at Reform for Naught
Legislation to prohibit elected officials from trading stocks has met with consistent failure. Included in that is a recent bipartisan effort by New York's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) and former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz.
Speaking of AOC, there was a dust-up this week when the New York congresswoman ran against Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) to lead the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. Connolly won decisively over AOC by a vote of 131 to 84. Politico Playbook, Punchbowl News, and Mediaite have published articles saying Nancy Pelosi had a hand in AOC's defeat. The back story, according to Mediaite, is Pelosi was "actively working to tank" AOC and made calls "behind the scenes" in support of Connolly. Whether the New York congresswoman's part in the congressional stock trading ban had something to do with it is anyone's guess.
It's doubtful that this trifecta of news involving the 84-year-old congresswoman will cause her concern, as Nancy Pelosi has proven she is a master of power politics inside the Beltway. Still, it’s been tough sledding for the former speaker, and we haven’t even entered the dead of winter.
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