At an unknown date during August 2024, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem illegally failed to disclose a secret $80,000 payment from a dark money group called the American Resolve Policy Fund (ARPF), which described the $80,000 as a “payment for fundraising.” This was after Trump tapped her for her current position while he was building his cabinet.
The way in which Noem accrued this money was also ethically dubious.
In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary.
ProPublica
The $80,000 payment was found in the annual tax form of the ARPF, which supports Noem politically. The spending of the group spurs more questions than answers.
In its first year, its main expenditures were paying Noem and covering the cost of some unspecified travel. It also maintains social media accounts devoted to promoting Noem. It has 100 followers on X.
ProPublica
The ARPF reported having zero employees despite having raised $1.1 million in 2023. The direct nexus between them and Noem does not end here. On June 22, 2023, Noem registered her personal company, Ashwood Strategies LLC, in Delaware. Only four minutes later, the ARPF joined in to headquarter themselves in Delaware too. Noem’s LLC was apparently awarded the $80,000 as a ten percent cut for having contributed to a haul of $800,000. An actual professional fundraiser was only paid seven percent of that $800,000.
Noem established her business during her second term as governor of South Dakota. She has likely broken South Dakotan law, which requires the governor to fully devote their time to public service. Instead, she designed an entire LLC to take advances from her book, “No Going Back.” The LLC had $50,000 for her “livestock and equipment.”
This is far from the first time Noem has committed an act of financial impropriety. She used taxpayer money for personal purposes, going to Canada for bear hunting and Houston, Texas for dental work (the South Dakota Department of Health has a list of federally qualified dental offices in the state — are they not good enough for her?). Given her propensity for luxury items, such as a $50,000 gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona Watch, this will unlikely be the last act of financial corruption as well.
