White House senior adviser Anita Dunn is being forced to divest an investment portfolio worth about $16.8 million to $48.2 million, which ethics lawyers say poses a significant conflict of interest in her new role.
The political and communications strategist will also have to step back from a host of domestic and international issues affecting her former clients.
Dunn’s new financial disclosures, which are 93 pages long, show extensive stocks, options, bonds and private holdings — a fortune she and her husband, veteran attorney Bob Bauer, have amassed over the years. Bauer is a high-powered attorney who served in the White House under the Obama administration; Dunn is a founding member of the consulting firm SKDK, where she has been paid $738,715 over the past 2 1/2 years, according to the White House. The disclosure form also provides insight into SKDK’s extensive client list.
White House spokesman Chris Meagher told CNBC in an email Thursday that Dunn will have to divest her holdings and is recused from all matters involving SKDK and its past clients. She also will not be able to attend any meetings involving them for two years, in accordance with the Biden-Harris ethics pledge, he said. The form discloses transactions during the two calendar years leading up to her appointment on May 9, Meagher added.
“Ethics rules require White House officials to recuse themselves from matters that conflict with their financial interests. When officials have a large scope of duties and an even larger stock portfolio, sunlight is the best disinfectant ,” Kedric Payne, vice president and general counsel of the Oversight Campaign Legal Center, said after reviewing her disclosure.
Dunn worked for the president as one of his top advisers from January 2021 to that August before returning for a brief stint this March. She was considered a special government employee for both positions, who was exempt from public disclosure of her wealth. She was not required to file a public disclosure form until her most recent appointment in May.
She returned as President Joe Biden’s poll numbers were in flux and the administration was grappling with a host of troubling global and domestic crises, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, computer chip shortages, rising gas prices and inflation in the U.S. growth. Biden also announced that he would nominate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court in late February.
The disclosure also shows dozens of stocks bought by Dunn and her husband, including call and put options tied to the S&P 500, corporate and municipal bonds, and a plethora of individual stocks held in multiple brokerage accounts. These brokerage accounts show investments in corporate giants such as Amazon, Alphabet, Boeing, Bank of America, Chevron, Dow, KKR and Morgan Stanley. The couple’s portfolio is diversified and includes at least $500,000 tied up in a hedge fund.
Ethics requirements for White House officials and lawmakers do not require exact values, relying on a fairly wide range. Based on her disclosure form, H. Jude Boudreaux, a senior financial planner at the Planning Center, estimated her and her husband’s holdings at between $16.8 million and $48.2 million. Boudreaux is a certified financial planner at the Planning Center. Lee Baker, a certified financial planner at Apex Financial Services, estimated that Dunn and her husband had a net worth of between $18 million and $38 million in assets. Their properties are not listed on the form or are not included in the calculation of their net worth.
The couple held between $1,000 and $15,000 in corporate bonds issued by Lockheed Martin, Phillip Morris, Target, Bank of America, Apple and Boeing, among others — all companies that have frequent and numerous issues requiring federal oversight. The pair held between $15,001 and $50,000 in debt issued by numerous other corporations, including Cisco Systems, Oracle, Wells Fargo, Duke Energy, Visa and Amazon. They also have multiple accounts or mutual funds valued at more than $500,000 each. Dunn also had between $1 million and $5 million in stock in marketing firm Stagwell, which she acquired after buying SKDK in 2015.
They also made tens of thousands of dollars exercising put options on the iShares Core S&P 500 index, which could create conflicts of interest with “every single company” in the S&P 500, according to Walter Shaub, who once ran the Office of Government Ethics. in the Obama administration and briefly served in the Trump administration.
“Options are not exempt from the conflict of interest statute under any circumstances. This means that she came into government with a conflict of interest with any company whose stock she wrote an option for and with any company in the referenced indexes. ,” Shaub said after reviewing Dunn’s financial disclosure. He said she must remove all options or retire on any matter “that affects any company in the S&P 500 and any other company whose stock is subject to an option that she held.”
The power couple also held numerous municipal bonds that were used for state and local infrastructure and school projects across America, including in Burlington County, New Jersey; Clark County, Nevada; Klein County Independent School District in Texas; and Miami Dade County, Florida, to name a few. The Biden administration has given hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars to local, city and state agencies and schools to improve transportation infrastructure, high-speed Internet access and invest in other public works projects.
SKDK is among the top 25 highest-paid Democratic political vendors in the country, according to nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets. The records show that during the 2020 election cycle, SKDK was paid more than $65 million by Democratic-affiliated campaigns. The Biden campaign paid more than $2 million for SKDK’s services last cycle, according to OpenSecrets data.
In an interview Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” she previewed the president’s next agenda as the White House reaps victories with the expected passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the signing of the CHIPS and Science Act into law.
“So addressing the ongoing opioid crisis that we have in this country is one of those things that he believes we need to work on together and that we can work on together,” Dunn said in Thursday’s MSNBC interview. “Cancer and ending cancer as we know it. Again, something very bipartisan that he believes everyone needs to work together on and that he’s going to continue to push. And he’s also going to continue to work toward an economy that it really works for working people in this country.”
Micron, one of Dunn’s former clients, announced shortly after the CHIPS Act was signed that it will invest $40 billion between now and 2030 to make chips in the U.S. Meagher noted that Dunn had nothing to do with the announcement. earlier this week and stopped working for Micron before she rejoined the White House.
Other clients include AT&T, American Clean Power Association, Lyft, Pivotal Ventures, Pfizer, Salesforce and Reddit.
Pivotal Ventures is an investment firm founded by Melinda French Gates, who divorced billionaire Bill Gates last year. French Gates has repeatedly visited the Biden-led White House, including in April, according to White House visitor logs. Meagher said the French Gates meetings were not arranged by Dunn, but noted that her previous work for Pivotal focused on issues related to paid family leave.
Salesforce has not been a Dunn client since 2020 and it was for a media training project, Meagher said. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his family met privately with Biden in mid-March, according to visitor logs. Meagher did not respond when asked if Dunn helped arrange that meeting, and Salesforce did not return a request for comment.
Most of the other customers mentioned in this story did not return requests for comment. A Reddit spokeswoman declined to comment.
Alexander Byers, an AT&T spokesman, told CNBC that SKDK “has provided us with strategic communications advice for more than a decade,” but Dunn was not the account executive. She gave periodic advice, he said.
