Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations

by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski
June 30, 2025, 5 a.m. EDT

In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.

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. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.

Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After President Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.

Experts told ProPublica it was troubling that Noem was personally taking money that came from political donors. In a filing, the group, a nonprofit called American Resolve Policy Fund, described the $80,000 as a payment for fundraising. The organization said Noem had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-political-donations-income-dark-money-dhs-ethics

 

Remember when Noem staged a visit to a prison in El Salvador where she posed in front of a cell jammed with prisoners while she was wearing a $60,000 Rolex watch?  Now we know how she could afford the watch.