Mike Rogers (MI) Corruption & Ethics Military Michigan

Mike Rogers Took Over the House Intelligence Committee. Seven Months Later, His Wife's Military Contractor Won a $1 Billion Embassy Contract.

Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers became chair of the House Intelligence Committee in January 2011. In July 2011, the private military firm his wife helped run won a $1 billion-plus contract to guard the U.S. embassy in Kabul. Before the marriage, his disclosures showed almost no wealth. Today the couple is worth millions.

MAGA Report Cards · Oct 15, 2026

Mike Rogers Took Over the House Intelligence Committee. Seven Months Later, His Wife's Military Contractor Won a $1 Billion Embassy Contract. — Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images, via Drop Site News

Mike Rogers (MI) wants Michigan to send him to the U.S. Senate. A new investigation shows how his family got rich the last time he held power in Washington.

On October 13, Drop Site News published a review of Rogers's financial disclosures from his years in Congress. The finding: after his 2007 divorce, the congressman "had few assets to his name and little wealth." Then he married a military-contracting executive, became one of the most powerful national-security officials in Congress — and the money started flowing to her company.

The timeline

Here's what happened, in order:

2006: Kristi Clemens, a former press aide for the U.S. occupation government in Iraq, pitches the British private military firm Aegis Defence Services on opening an American branch. She rose to CEO and president within a few years.
2010: Rogers marries her. That same year, Aegis is named one of only eight private military firms qualified to bid on a $10 billion State Department program to guard U.S. diplomats overseas.
January 3, 2011: Rogers becomes chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — the panel that oversees America's spy agencies, with access to secrets most members of Congress never see. By then his wife is vice chair of Aegis's U.S. company.
July 29, 2011: Seven months later, Aegis wins the contract to guard the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan — worth $1.017 billion, according to Drop Site.

Kristi Rogers later bragged about it. A biography on the website of her next employer, the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips — since scrubbed — said she led "a two-year pursuit and capture strategy to win a five-year, $10 billion contract."

The money

As the contracts grew, so did the Rogers family's bank account. Common Dreams, summarizing Drop Site's review of the disclosures, reported that Rogers listed just $4,000 to $60,000 in investments in 2008, after his divorce. In the first year of his new marriage, the couple reported $136,000 to $391,000. Three years later it was $230,000 to $925,000. They also picked up two mortgages on properties in Maryland and Virginia, neither of them their main home.

House rules didn't require Rogers to report his wife's salary — only investment income — so the full picture of what Aegis paid her was never public.

Then he left Congress and got rich in the industry he used to oversee. Business Insider found he collected nearly $2 million from board positions at tech and cybersecurity companies in the two years before it reported in early 2024. Today, his own federal disclosure reports that he and his wife hold between $6.7 million and $13.5 million in assets. We've already reported that he's still cashing taxpayer pension checks on top of all that.

Even Republicans called it a conflict

This isn't a story only Democrats are telling. In 2014, the conservative group Judicial Watch published a report titled "Unraveling Benghazi: Is Mike Rogers Part of the Problem?" It pointed out that Aegis had been active in Libya since early 2011 — and that Rogers, as Intelligence chair, was investigating the attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans in 2012.

Conservatives accused him of slow-walking that investigation. Conservative pollster Dick Morris, as Drop Site quotes him, wrote in 2016 that Rogers "was a key force in obstructing and delaying the Benghazi investigation in order to shield his wife, Kristi, from scrutiny," and that Aegis "had won several major contracts, likely through Mrs. Rogers' influence as the wife of the House Intel Committee."

Judicial Watch's report also stated there was "no evidence of wrong-doing" by Rogers or Aegis — it called the story "an insider's game of covert operations and corporate profits played out in the gray areas of law and policy." The Intelligence Committee said at the time that it had a "no interaction" policy with Mrs. Rogers or anyone from Aegis. As Drop Site dryly noted, that policy "presumably did not apply between husband and wife."

In March 2014, Rogers announced he wouldn't run again. His wife left Aegis.

What Rogers says

His campaign told Drop Site: "The accusation that Mike used his position in Congress to protect his family in any way, shape, or form is patently false." It then pivoted to attacking his opponent's father-in-law.

This fits a pattern we keep finding. Rogers took $95,000 from phone companies, then wrote a bill that would have let them hand your data to the government. He holds up to $2.6 million in companies that gain from the AI build-out. The man asking Michigan for a Senate seat has spent his career making public power and private money run together.

What the disclosures show

Mike Rogers (MI) became chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in January 2011, while his wife was vice chair of the U.S. arm of a private military firm. Seven months later, that firm won a $1.017 billion contract to guard the U.S. embassy in Kabul — a win she later took credit for leading. His reported investments went from $4,000–$60,000 before the marriage to as much as $925,000 three years into it, and the couple now report $6.7 million to $13.5 million in assets.