As several Obama-era officials return to the White House under President Joe Biden, their meeting comes with fuller pockets and deeper ties to corporate interests, new financial disclosure reports show.
According to ABC News’ analysis of the most recent disclosure reports, many of the top White House officials in Biden, including Chief of Staff Ron Klain, the Director of the Domestic Policy Council, Susan Rice, the Director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese and coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients have substantially multiplied their wealth in recent years.
Rice, who is among the wealthiest members of the Biden team at the White House, has dramatically increased his fortune since his previous job at the White House during the Obama administration, reporting between $ 36 million and $ 149 million in various assets in his new document released on Saturday morning.
This is almost three to four times the amount she reported in 2009, when she joined the Obama administration as an ambassador to the United Nations. At that time, she reported total wealth between $ 13.6 million and $ 40.4 million, and the number did not increase dramatically when she served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser during her second term.
In his most recent lawsuit, Rice reported that he held shares worth between $ 250,000 and $ 5 million in large corporations, including Johnson & Johnson, Apple and Microsoft. She also had a significant amount of stock options on Netflix, where she served as a board member, and reported having earned more than $ 300,000 from exercising Netflix’s stock options last year. In addition, it reported shares in several companies in the oil and gas industry, including $ 1 million to $ 5 million in stakes in Canadian natural gas distribution multinational Enbridge Inc.
Rice, who served as president of its author and speaker SERice LLC, won about $ 620,000 in various corporate and academic lectures last year and $ 250,000 in book royalties, with her total income in the previous year between $ 2 million and $ 6.7 million.
ABC News has not yet obtained Rice’s ethics agreement, so it is still unclear whether she has divested or will dispose of her assets in private companies or refuse matters related to those companies – except for her stock options on Netflix, which she said in her disclosure report that she will divest. The White House did not immediately respond to ABC News’s request for comment.
“These White House employees are experienced government leaders, whose past experience in the private sector is part of a broad and diverse set of skills they bring to government service,” a White House spokesman told ABC News in a statement. “They returned to the government because of their deep commitment to public service, their desire to help lift our nation out of this time of crisis and its strong belief that the government can work for the American people.”
Klain, a longtime adviser to Biden, has also tripled his fortune since 2009, showing a comparison of his past with the new disclosures. When Klain joined the Obama administration in 2009 as Biden’s chief of staff, Klain reported having between $ 1.4 million and $ 3.5 million in assets, and now enters the Biden government with between $ 4.4 million and US $ 12.2 million in various assets.
Much of Klain’s wealth comes from various assets related to his job. In 2020, he received nearly $ 2 million in salary from venture capital firm Revolution LLC, where he was executive vice president and general counsel, compared with $ 1 million who reported receiving a salary in his lawsuit earlier in the year. 2009.
Zients is the only richest employee in the Biden administration who released assets on Saturday night, overtaking Vanita Gupta, named Biden as associate attorney general, in his total assets. The White House has yet to release all of the disclosures requested by ABC News.
Zients said it had between $ 89.3 million and $ 442.8 million in assets, including several investment funds, real estate and cash shares. He sold his shares in his private investment firm, Cranemere Group, as well as $ 1 million in Facebook shares, where he served as a board member.
He reported earning between $ 10.4 million and $ 28 million last year, including his investment firm’s seven-digit salary, as well as several other seven-digit assets he discarded.
His total wealth has more than doubled since he joined the Obama White House as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2009, when he reported assets between $ 45.2 million and $ 205.7 million.
In her disclosure report, White House press secretary Jen Psaki reported that she received a communications consultancy fee in excess of $ 5,000 from Zients – although the report does not contain any further details about the transaction. His assets have also grown significantly since his first job at the White House during the Obama administration. In 2009, Psaki reported between $ 32,000 and $ 130,000 in assets and $ 125,000 in income, but in 2021 she reported that her wealth had increased at least ten times, to up to $ 1.5 million in assets with an annual income of approximately $ 647,742.
Much of her income last year came from Evergreen Consulting LLC, which she founded, and the think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She also worked as a contributor to CNN and a consultant to WestExec, a consulting firm founded in 2017 by current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in which several Obama-era employees worked. In addition to the $ 5,000 Zients paid to her, she received the same consulting fee as Lyft, among a handful of other companies.
Deese’s wealth has also multiplied dramatically since 2009, when he took his first job at the White House as Obama’s special assistant for economic policy. In 2015, just a few months in his role as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Deese reported having between $ 81,000 and $ 215,000 in assets – but now, as a member of the Biden administration, he reported between $ 2 million and $ 7 , 2 million in assets. Prior to joining the Biden administration, Deese earned $ 2.3 million in salary from investment firm BlackRock as Global Head of Sustainable Investments, compared to the $ 175,000 in salary he received last year as deputy director of OMB of Obama.
Senior government officials typically alienate their financial interests in specific private companies that they can regulate, as required by ethics rules, or refuse matters that could affect their personal financial interests. Some of the Biden White House officials have indicated in their disclosure reports that they will stray from their corporate interests, but the full extent of their plans to avoid conflict of interest is not yet known because ABC News has not yet obtained its ethical agreements.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, White House deputy chief of staff, received consulting fees from General Electric, Lyft, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Gates Ventures, among others, as clients of Precision Strategies, a marketing agency of which she was a founding partner.
She reported between $ 2.2 million to $ 4.7 million in assets on her disclosure form and more than $ 800,000 in revenue last year, which includes $ 426,067 of deferred compensation and Precision Strategies compensation, in addition to $ 50,000 in the company’s salary. She also earned over $ 110,000 as Beto O’Rourke’s campaign manager before becoming Biden’s campaign manager with a salary of more than $ 190,000.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s current national security adviser, is another multimillionaire, reporting assets between $ 7.5 million and $ 27.5 million held with his wife, Margaret Goodlander, former legal adviser to the now attorney general judge Merrick Garland. Much of his wealth comes from a long list of residential and commercial real estate properties spread across Florida and New Hampshire, and he has also reported owning shares worth five to six dollars in private companies, including Abbott Labs, American Express, Facebook, FedEx , Google, Merck, Visa and Verizon.
Sullivan’s salary at consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners last year was $ 138,000, and his corporate consulting clients included Uber, LEGO, MasterCard and Standard Chartered Bank. He also held academic positions at Yale and Dartmouth.
At First Lady Jill Biden’s office, Chief of Staff Julissa Reynoso was a partner at the law firm Winston & Strawn, where she earned more than $ 1.5 million last year with a $ 150,000 bonus. She reported between $ 4.1 million and $ 14.8 million in assets, and made up to $ 1.9 million in total revenue last year, including revenue from rental properties in New York and Miami, as well as commercial properties in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Henderson, North Carolina, among others. She also listed a vacant beachfront property in the Dominican Republic on her disclosure form.
The disclosures were provided by the White House to ABC News on Saturday.
Justin Gomez of ABC News contributed to this report.