BROKAW: You just mentioned natural gas and emphasized it in your last radio address. And then we read in the “Wall Street Journal” you and your husband made a substantial investment in the plan that T. Boone Pickens put forward which has a heavy emphasis on natural gas.
SPEAKER PELOSI: Let me see if you call substantial 0.3% of our –
BROKAW: between 1 –
SPEAKER PELOSI: It was 50 to $100,000. And it’s part of an entrepreneurial package. This is a package we sign up with. This is what they invest in. That’s not the point. I’m investing in something I believe in. I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuel.
In other words, “hey, Tom, I’m almost as rich as Cindy McCain, but don’t call me an elitist, even though I’m bragging to you here on Meet the Press how filthy rich I am. I mean, I’m so rich and this puny $100,000 investment means so little to me that, although it looks bad, there’s absolutely no conflict of interest whatsoever.”
Here’s the WSJ article on it. An excerpt:
WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband invested between $50,000 and $100,000 in T. Boone Pickens’s Clean Energy Fuels Corp., which could benefit from legislation the California Democrat favors to boost U.S. use of natural gas.
The investment is a small fraction of the Pelosis’ net worth. But it highlights the unlikely alliance evolving between Mr. Pickens, an oil man with a long history of support for Republican causes, and powerful Democrats who have welcomed Mr. Pickens’s recent campaign for developing alternatives to oil.
Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Mrs. Pelosi, said the investment “does not raise any direct conflict-of-interest issues” or violate any ethics rules of the House of Representatives. “The speaker has been an advocate for increasing our country’s energy independence and for renewable energy for years, long before this purchase,” Mr. Hammill said. He said Mrs. Pelosi was unavailable to comment directly on the issue.