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.
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.
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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.
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Laurence Pelosi’s stake in Restore Utah, according to his wife’s disclosures, was worth between $2 million and $10 million as of July 2022. Between 5% and 10% of Restore Utah tenants have historically used Section 8 vouchers, according to HUD’s response to Alexis Pelosi’s waiver request.
Nancy, Laurence and Alexis Pelosi did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
“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.
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Alexis Pelosi did not list her husband’s employment at Crow Holdings, a real estate firm he joined in 2019 and is currently a senior managing director at, on her financial disclosures.
Laurence Pelosi was named the co-lead of Crow Holdings Renewables in June 2023, after his wife became a senior climate advisor at HUD.
“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.
Alexis Pelosi also attended a dinner hosted by Enterprise Community Partners in D.C. on the dime of Crow Holdings, receiving another ethics waiver to allow her husband’s company to pay the $300 tab because she was attending in her personal capacity, not as a representative of HUD, according to documents obtained by the DCNF. In her waiver request, however, she did not mention that she had met with one Enterprise Community Partners senior director for a Zoom call less than two weeks before applying for the waiver.
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“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.”
HUD did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.