How Penny Pritzker Put Money In Her Direct Pocket As Commerce Secretary. “That meant that the commerce secretary could be seen as, in effect, the landlord of the Department of Commerce. The annual rent: $1.4 million.”

The New York Post reports:

Pritzker met Barack and Michelle Obama when Barack was a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and her family and the Obamas became fast friends, vacationing together regularly.

Throughout Barack Obama’s political career, Pritzker has been one of his major donors and bundlers. When Pritzker became Commerce Secretary in 2013, she resigned from Hyatt’s board and other potentially conflicting obligations, but maintained her ownership of $400 million in Hyatt stock — Hyatt was a major government contractor — as well as “the vast bulk of her real estate holdings.”

This included Artemis Real Estate, a “private equity real estate investment manager” that “raised $736 million to be used to purchase office buildings. With her White House connections, the federal government, including the government department Pritzker would later head, became a profitable tenant for Artemis and the Pritzker empire.”

In 2013, Artemis purchased the mixed-use Alexandria, VA, complex known as the Carlyle Center, which housed the offices of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which is part of the Commerce Department.

“That meant that the commerce secretary could be seen as, in effect, the landlord of the Department of Commerce. The annual rent: $1.4 million.”

While Pritzker was Commerce Secretary, Artemis purchased, alone or in joint ventures, buildings that brought in over $1.6 million in annual rent from separate US government tenants.


Even more blatant and convoluted, “some tenants of Pritzker-owned companies also received Department of Commerce contracts and money from Pritzker.”

Pritzker bought a 102,000-square-foot industrial space in Huntington, CA, in 2013, and gave a 10-year lease worth $9.1 million to aircraft company Driessen Aircraft Interior Systems. Driessen’s parent company, Zodiac Aerospace, is regulated by the Department of Commerce. Another of their subsidiaries, Zodiac of North America, received almost $800,000 in contracts from Secretary Pritzker.

Rent-seeking gone wild......