The Hill: Warren pushes for Hegseth’s wife to divest from defense company stocks

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter Friday to President-elect Trump's Defense secretary pick, Pete Hegseth, asking for his wife to divest from thousands of dollars worth of stock she holds in defense company stocks, calling it a conflict of interest.

Warren said she found Hegseth's wife, Jennifer Rauchet, holds stock in top defense contractors like Northrop Grumman Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp., Honeywell International, IBM, and Microsoft, along with smaller contractors and also large companies like Oracle, Google, Thermo Fisher Scientific, T-Mobile, Mastercard, Danaher Corp., and Pepsi.

In the letter, obtained exclusively by The Hill, Warren noted Defense Department policy prohibits certain stock investments for appointed roles.

The threshold for divestment is when it exceeds $15,000, according to the Office of Government Ethics.

Rauchet owns $15,000 in the largest defense contractors and more than $15,000 in other companies like Google, Oracle and T-Mobile, according to Warren, who said Hegseth's household should divest from both investments.

"These holdings reasonably raise doubts about whether you may be making decisions at least in part to protect your household's stock holdings, rather than purely in the interest of the American people," she wrote. "The risk of a conflict is not theoretical; some of these contractors have settled allegations that they overbilled DoD to the tune of millions of dollars."

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Read the full article here.

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