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In late August 2020, readers inquired about a meme circulating on Facebook that claimed falsely that U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had rigged legislation to help her husband benefit financially from selling off property belonging to the U.S. Postal Service. The meme's text reads: It's true that Speaker Pelosi's husband Paul Pelosi owns and operates Financial Leasing Services, a San Francisco-based investment company. Financial disclosures in 2018, the most recent available, show Speaker Pelosi's estimated net worth to be $114 million. But Speaker Pelosi doesn't sit on the House Appropriations Committee. Her spokesman Drew Hammill told us by email she hasn't been on the committee since 2002. Furthermore, we found no evidence that a bill to sell off $9 billion-worth of federally-owned U.S. Postal Service property exists. It's true that the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would, if signed into law, provide $25 billion to shore up the Postal Service and rectify delays in mail delivery service, but it doesn't allocate $1.25 billion toward making sure voting ballots are legit. The funding was originally on the table during negotiations over a coronavirus stimulus package, but those negotiations broke down. Whether the stand-alone Postal Service funding bill will be signed into law by U.S. President Donald Trump seems unlikely. The meme seems to be a rehash of a similar one that dates back to 2013 — except in that case the subject of the claim was Richard Blum, the husband of U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., who like Pelosi hails from San Francisco.
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