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According to a report from The Daily Beast, newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has no assets. Or at least, no assets that he notes on his required annual financial disclosures. That means he has no savings account. No checking account. No retirement account. And neither does his wife.
Lawmakers are required to file an annual disclosure statement listing assets and liabilities. Rules were tightened by the STOCK Act in 2012, making it harder for members of Congress to hide their personal wealth. Yet Johnson has listed nothing for years.
There is a possibility that Johnson has so little money in any of his accounts that he doesn’t have to list them. There’s also the possibility that Johnson is using accounting tricks to dodge House Ethics Committee guidelines. And there’s the possibility that Johnson is simply not reporting where he keeps his money. All of this is a symptom of a simple fact: Johnson was an almost complete unknown before he strolled into the speakership during chaotic infighting within the Republican Party, and unlike most national figures, he has received little vetting from the national press.
The guidelines for House members require listing of accounts holding over $1,000 and don’t require members to report assets if the total of all accounts is less than $5,000. That does suggest an out for any member of Congress just scraping by. However, prior to his move into Congress, Johnson was the dean of a “Christian law school” (that never got around to admitting students) and worked for two decades as a lawyer for various right-wing foundations. It certainly seems as if he could save a few pennies for a rainy day.
Johnson’s family maintains a home in Washington, D.C., and another in Benton, Louisiana (where the median home lists for $417,000). Johnson’s disclosure lists a mortgage liability between $250,000 and $500,000. Any mortgage payment in that range should require a payment of well over $1,000 a month. Somehow, Mike and his wife, Kelly, manage to cover the expenses of those homes without ever holding more than $1,000 in any checking account. Presumably, they pay in cash.
The Johnsons also have four children that they somehow care for without ever topping those limits. That’s not counting the Black “son” that Johnson said he and Kelly “took custody of” when they were “newlyweds,” but which Johnson may have taken in two years before he was married.
There are many Americans living paycheck to paycheck, trying to take care of their homes and kids, who never come close to having $5,000 in the bank. It just seems odd that one of those people is knocking down a minimum $174,000 salary (which goes up to $223,500 as speaker) on top of over 20 years of legal practice.
The Ethics Committee rules on reporting cover accounts at banks, credit unions, and savings and loan associations. So Johnson didn’t dodge the reporting pen through some technicality on that front. The rules also include savings, checking, money market accounts, certificates of deposit, and IRAs. Which seems fairly complete.
When he filed his first disclosure report in 2017, Johnson did report tapping into an IRA for a $10,485 early withdrawal. However, Johnson did not list the IRA account among his assets after that year. So perhaps Johnson tapped out his retirement funds with that early withdrawal.
There are several possible explanations for Johnson’s lack of bank accounts. For example, not only are there those $1,000 and $5,000 minimums, but those numbers apply as of the May 15 filing date each year.
Johnson could simply dice all his money into tiny fragments that are kept at multiple institutions to ensure that he never tiptoes over the line where he would have to report his assets. Or he could make sure all those accounts were tapped out each May 15, wait until the reporting deadline had passed, and then put everything back. Either option would take some serious timing, especially as his monthly take-home pay likely exceeds $10,000. But it could be done. Or Johnson could keep everything in cold hard cash stuffed in his mattress and dispatch Kelly and the children to handle all their payments in person.
As the director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told The Daily Beast, “It’s strange to see Speaker Johnson disclose no assets. He made over $200,000 last year, and his wife took home salary from two employers as well, so why isn’t there a bank account or any form of savings listed?”
The simplest explanation is that Johnson is hiding his assets.
In the last few days, Johnson’s wife, Kelly, has taken down the website of her “counseling” business that compared being gay to bestiality and incest. Both husband and wife appear to have spent time scrubbing their past social media posts. And the new speaker appears unable to remember his many scathing editorials and past attempts at anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. And there’s the ongoing mystery over the whereabouts of the man Johnson insists is his adopted Black son.
Characters like Rep. Jim Jordan have very big skeletons in their closet, but at least they’ve been in the spotlight long enough to identify some of the severe issues in their past. Johnson has largely flown under the radar before now. We’re only starting to discover that he has a house overrun with closets. Totaling all the skeletons might take a lot more accounting than Johnson appears to be devoting to his disclosure forms.
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