Mike Rogers and his second wife, Kristi, saw their wealth rise substantially after Rogers was elevated to chair of the House Intelligence Committee in 2011 and lucrative government contracts poured her way, a review of financial disclosures finds.
Rogers was first elected to Congress in 2000, in time to be a major backer of the Iraq war. With a background at the FBI, Rogers was encouraged by Speaker Dennis Hastert to get involved in foreign policy and national security matters. According to the Rogers Archive at Oakland University, he made seven trips to Iraq between 2001 and 2005 as a member of Congress. In 2005, he was appointed to the House Intelligence Committee. (Drop Site could not independently verify the number of trips, but taking seven trips to Iraq in the space of four years would be highly unusual for a member of Congress—and trips in 2001 or 2002, before the invasion, are unlikely.)
Kristi Clemens was a top press aide to L. Paul Bremer, who oversaw the U.S. occupation of Iraq as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Clemens turned heads in DC in 2006, when, following her role in Iraq, she successfully pitched the major British security contractor Aegis Defence Services to launch an American offshoot. Within three years, she rose to CEO and president. Rogers divorced his wife of 17 years in 2007 and married Clemens in 2010. By 2011, when Mike Rogers assumed his chairmanship, she was vice chair of Aegis LLC US.
After his divorce, according to Rogers’s financial disclosures, the congressman had few assets to his name and little wealth. That would soon change.
The Rogers family added at least hundreds of thousands of dollars to their net worth as Rogers was elevated to chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and Kristi Rogers’s private military security company received increasingly large contracts from the U.S. government, according to Rogers’s financial disclosures. The couple added millions more after Rogers left the House and began working in the industry he had spent years overseeing.
While Rogers is not required to disclose his spouse’s income, their reported “Unearned Income,” including multiple investment funds, dividends, and interest income, soared over those years. They also acquired two mortgages in Maryland and Virginia—neither principal residences.
