unique visitors counter Ethics Office Tells Susan Rice To Divest Multimillion Dollar Stake In Company Backed By Biden Admin – Washington News

Washington News

Washington News Today

OPINION 

Ethics Office Tells Susan Rice To Divest Multimillion Dollar Stake In Company Backed By Biden Admin

Adam Curran 0 Comments

Sharing is caring!

Susan Rice was caught with her hands in the cookie jar and she will end up making a ton of cash on some nice stock moves that happen to coincide with some official moves of the Joe Biden administration.

While the Biden administration was revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline project, the Biden Justice Department officials ok’d a permit for the Line 3 pipeline project. Rice has considerable holdings, around $2.7 million, in the Canadian oil and gas pipeline company constructing the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. That stock is up a lot since the announcement.

Now Rice is under fire from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to divest those stock holdings and divest from many other companies that have business before the government. In all, they want her to divest stock worth nearly $32 million from more than three dozen companies and one index fund that she and her family own. But don’t worry about Susan if she actually does the right thing – she will get a huge tax write-off for doing it.

From The Daily Poster:

Rice’s decision to retain stakes in Enbridge and other corporations with business before the government she helps lead has not only generated questions about conflicts of interest, it has also created a potentially lucrative tax shelter for herself and her family, thanks to a law allowing federal officials to defer capital gains levies when facing divestment orders from ethics regulators.

Past beneficiaries of this tax break have included former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, who sold $500 million in Goldman Sachs stock after joining the Bush administration, and former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, who unloaded $54 million worth of company stock after becoming Secretary of State in the Trump administration.

Biden Energy Secretary Jen Granholm recently made $1.6 million when she divested from an electric vehicle company.

“There is no perfect way to handle divestitures, especially slow motion ones involving substantial conflicts of interest,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project.

“That’s why ethics policies focusing on divestitures and recusals and the like are less effective than simply choosing people without significant conflicts between their personal investments and the policy commitments of the president they serve.”

The Office of Government Ethics is also ordering Rice and her family to sell off nearly $1.1 million worth of shares of Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical giant and COVID-19 vaccine maker, housed in a family trust.

In April, the Biden administration temporarily halted the use of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine after it was linked to a rare blood clotting disorder.

On Monday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine may slightly increase the risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder.

Here is the ethics document.

216