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By Nicholas Loffredo
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Financial disclosure forms filed by dozens of White House staffers provide a glimpse at their recent compensation, assets and liabilities, revealing an extremely wealthy group surrounding President Donald Trump.
The disclosures made available Friday night include roughly 180 West Wing staffers, excluding the president and Vice President Mike Pence. The forms filled out by the likes of advisers Stephen Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner and many more list their recent work histories, sources of income, employment agreements, spouse incomes and liabilities at the time of their appointments. They do not include any subsequent divestments of assets made upon assuming their posts.
However, the White House made the process of obtaining the information challenging. A list of all staffers' reports wasn't made publicly available. Instead, interested reporters had to essentially guess at who may have had to file the disclosure reports and then formally request each one.
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A combined effort by ProPublica, the Associated Press and the New York Times has simplified the process by obtaining 81 staffers' disclosures as of Saturday evening and making them available to all via a public Google Drive folder that will continue to be expanded as more reports are obtained.
Among the highlights:
- Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, made at least $1.3 million in 2016 and valued his consulting firm, Bannon Strategic Advisors, at $5 million to $25 million.
- Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter and adviser, may be worth up to $741 million, primarily through Kushner Companies real estate developments and investments.
- Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, had assets worth more than $230 million. The former Goldman Sachs president listed at least $48 million in income in 2016 and as much as $77 million.
- Conway, who was a pollster and GOP strategist before joining the Trump team, made more than $800,000 last year from the polling company inc./WomanTrend.
- Chief of Staff Reince Priebus earned a $225,000 salary from the Republican National Committee in 2016 but received $175,000 in bonuses, paid out in 2016 and 2017, and earned more than $33,000 as a payout when he left the RNC.
"These are incredibly successful individuals, very high-net worth, very sophisticated complex asset structures, numerous sub LLCs, trusts and other items, all of which have to be worked through," a senior White House ethics official told reporters before the data was released.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer—who earned $260,000 in salary and bonuses last year at the RNC—said Friday that the staffers' wealth highlights their selflessness due to what they left behind to join the administration. "The president has brought a lot of people into this administration, and this White House in particular, who have been very blessed and very successful by this country, and have given up a lot to come into government by setting aside a lot of assets. And I think it speaks volumes to the desire for a lot of these people to fulfill the president's vision and move the agenda forward that they are willing to list all of their assets, undergo this public scrutiny, but also set aside a lot."
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