Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and her husband are classic lifetime government careerists, but public service hasn’t stopped them from getting rich.
Masto, now 58, launched her public sector career after graduating from law school in 1990. She was a judicial clerk, a staffer to a governor, a federal prosecutor, a county bureaucrat, a state education employee, and Nevada attorney general, before being elected in 2016 to the Senate seat she hopes to defend in November. Paul Masto was a Secret Service agent who met his wife when he was coordinating a Nevada visit for Bill Clinton. Nine years his wife’s senior, Paul Masto is now retired.
Despite spending their careers on government payrolls, the couple built a joint net worth of between $2 million and $7.5 million, according to the financial disclosure Masto filed with the Senate last month.
The disclosures do not require filers to include the value of their personal residence, or of federal retirement benefits for when their spouse is a retired federal employee.
One joint bank account, at Town & Country Bank, has between $1 million and $5 million in it, records show. Another bank account solely in the senator’s name, at the Clark County Credit Union, has between $100,000 and $250,000 in it. The form reports assets only in broad ranges, so putting an exact figure on the amount is not possible.
The senator or her husband own between $500,000 and $1.3 million in mutual funds. Between $230,000 and $601,000 in mutual funds are listed as belonging to Paul Masto, while the rest is owned either by the senator or jointly.
Then there is her retirement account from the Nevada Public Employees’ Retirement System, which has up to $500,000 in it.
During her 2016 Senate campaign, USA Today reported that Nevada’s next senator would not be a millionaire: It would be a choice between Republican Joe Heck, who had a net worth between negative $350,000 and positive $350,000, and Masto.
But Sen. Masto’s net worth rose quickly while she was in office, with an increase ranking her 12th among senators when comparing reports from 2016 and 2020. For that analysis, The Daily Wire calculated net worth by subtracting liabilities from assets and taking the average of the reported ranges. Masto stood out in that the members who saw a larger increase than her tended to have entered the Senate as wealthy businessmen who saw their existing investments appreciate, like Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) and Mark Warner (D-Virginia).
Nothing about her finances suggests wrongdoing. But the couple’s comfortable nest egg raises questions about how in touch the senator — who is in a tight re-election race this year — is with Nevada residents. The median household income in Nevada is $62,000, according to the Census.
It also raises questions about whether government employees are underpaid, as President Joe Biden suggested this week when pledging raises for federal workers. That particularly goes for those who are connected at high political levels. Paul Masto, the retired Secret Service agent, is friends with Hunter Biden, according to materials on Hunter’s abandoned laptop, reviewed by The Daily Wire.
Ironically, Paul Masto donated $100 to Hunter Biden’s “Live Below The Line” fundraiser, a challenge in which wealthy people pledge to try to survive on a few dollars a day in order to understand the plight of the poor, according to an email on Hunter’s laptop.
In 2009, Paul attended a football game with Hunter, according to Hunter’s calendar. In a 2010 email, Beau Biden, the president’s now-deceased oldest son and attorney general of Delaware, called Paul a “friend of Hunt’s and mine” who “wants to start collecting checks out there for us, do an event at some point.”
The government’s generous pensions and early retirement age often allow government employees to double-dip by continuing to work elsewhere after they are “retired.” But the data does not suggest that a lucrative post-government career was the source of the Mastos’ nest egg.
After protecting presidents, he retired in 2007 as head of the Las Vegas Field Office, according to a biography. That year he created a private executive protection firm, Universal Security Specialists. But it was valued at less than $15,000 on Senate disclosure forms, and was dissolved in 2020.
Paul had been pleading for business since 2010, when he wrote to Hunter, “I opened a new office and have been pretty busy. Do you know anyone who needs a Vulnerability Assessment or Executive Protection?” He complained, “I just heard a rumor that the VP is going to Reno soon. I never hear from anyone on his staff anymore. I offered the Deputy Chief of Staff to do Advances for his staff and to train advance personnel. but no one ever called me back. Oh well!”
In 2019 and 2020, the Biden presidential campaign paid it $24,000 in 2019 and 2020, as Breitbart reported.
In 2019, the Senate filing said he was also paid commissions by First Tactical LLC, which sells gear to law enforcement. As of 2021, Paul’s source of income was an airport in San Antonio, Texas, that was paying him for contract security work, according to the Senate financial disclosure.
In 2017, the couple sold a home in Reno for $800,000 after purchasing it in 2007 for $718,000, according to county real estate records. In 2020, the senator reported selling a piece of undeveloped land in Las Vegas for between $250,000 and $500,000 (it counted towards her assets before the sale since it was assessed in the same range).
The couple still owns a single-family rental home in Las Vegas, which is valued at between $250,000 and $500,000 and brings in between $15,000 and $50,000 in income annually. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that Clark County paid Paul $27,000 as part of a federal rental-assistance program.
The senator’s office did not return a request for comment, and Paul did not return a request for more information about the couple’s finances.
Source: Dailywire
