Top Biden Adviser Anita Dunn Still Divesting Multimillion-Dollar Portfolio After Four Months
President Joe Biden’s close adviser Anita Dunn has not divested herself of a sprawling investment portfolio estimated to be worth millions of dollars since returning to the White House, raising concerns from a top ethics attorney.
The White House said in August that Dunn would divest her holdings and recuse herself from all matters involving the Democratic consulting firm she founded and her past clients.
With her husband, Bob Bauer, White House counsel under former President Barack Obama, Dunn holds a diverse stock portfolio ranging in value from $16.8 million to $48.2 million, according to an estimate by CNBC. It includes corporate bonds issued by companies subject to regular federal oversight and call and put option contracts on the S&P 500, municipal and corporate bonds, and individual stocks for biopharmaceutical, telecommunications, technology, and energy giants. Her salary from SKDK, a corporate consulting firm and major political vendor, was $738,715.
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Yet four months into her tenure, Dunn’s portfolio divestment is “still in process,” according to a White House official who said the adviser is “taking all necessary steps to do so.”
Dunn “has the appropriate recusals in place” in the meantime, the official said.
Asked whether Dunn had sold any of her publicly traded assets, the official did not respond.
At dozens of pages long, Dunn’s filing holds a litany of possible conflicts of interest, with the delay posing major concerns, said Walter Shaub, director of the Office of Government Ethics under Obama and briefly under former President Donald Trump.
“That’s an outrageously slow pace for divestitures,” Shaub told the Washington Examiner. “Presidential nominees requiring Senate confirmation get 90 days, with the expectation that they’ll try to accomplish divestitures sooner. It should be the same for White House appointees, especially in the case of someone like Dunn, who entered government with a massive portfolio of potentially conflicting investments.”
Dunn’s 93-page disclosure would lead to extensive recusals, Shaub said.
“The conflict of interest law applied to her from the moment she entered government, so what in the world does she do all day if she’s recusing from all the things that could affect her many, many financial interests? And how did she avoid conflicts of interest the other times she joined this administration?” he said.
As for Dunn’s publicly traded assets, Shaub said there “would be no excuse for a delay” in selling them.
Dunn entered the White House in May after two earlier stints during which she bypassed traditional disclosure obligations with a temporary role. As a “special government employee” making just below the $132,552 salary threshold for disclosure, Dunn kept private her asset portfolio. A so-called SGE generally holds the position for 130 days or less and can continue to advise outside clients.
Her newly public filing details her work and asset holdings over the two years leading up to her appointment as assistant and senior adviser to the president in May.
In line with the administration’s ethics pledge, Dunn isn’t able to join any meetings with her former clients for two years, White House spokesman Chris Meagher told CNBC in August.
But despite advising Biden for months, it wasn’t until Dunn returned to the White House in May that her position required a public disclosure of financial assets and former clients.
For a White House quick to proclaim itself the most upstanding administration in history, Dunn’s drawn-out process is cause for concern.
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By comparison, climate envoy John Kerry divested hundreds of thousands of dollars of energy-related investments in March 2021 after joining the administration in January, an analysis of federal filings by ABC News showed at the time.
“The seeming indifference to potential conflicts of interest sends such a bad message to appointees, as well as rank and file employees,” Shaub said.
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