By Ryan Grim and Nancy Skinner – Drop Site News
Mike Rogers and his second wife, Kristi, saw their wealth rise substantially after Rogers was elevated to chair of the House Intelligence Committee in 2011 and lucrative government contracts poured her way, a review of financial disclosures finds.
Rogers was first elected to Congress in 2000, in time to be a major backer of the Iraq war. With a background at the FBI, Rogers was encouraged by Speaker Dennis Hastert to get involved in foreign policy and national security matters. According to the Rogers Archive at Oakland University, he made seven trips to Iraq between 2001 and 2005 as a member of Congress. In 2005, he was appointed to the House Intelligence Committee. (Drop Site could not independently verify the number of trips, but taking seven trips to Iraq in the space of four years would be highly unusual for a member of Congress—and trips in 2001 or 2002, before the invasion, are unlikely.)
Kristi Clemens was a top press aide to L. Paul Bremer, who oversaw the U.S. occupation of Iraq as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Clemens turned heads in DC in 2006, when, following her role in Iraq, she successfully pitched the major British security contractor Aegis Defence Services to launch an American offshoot. Within three years, she rose to CEO and president. Rogers divorced his wife of 17 years in 2007 and married Clemens in 2010. By 2011, when Mike Rogers assumed his chairmanship, she was vice chair of Aegis LLC US.
After his divorce, according to Rogers’s financial disclosures, the congressman had few assets to his name and little wealth. That would soon change.
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The Rogers family added at least hundreds of thousands of dollars to their net worth as Rogers was elevated to chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and Kristi Rogers’s private military security company received increasingly large contracts from the U.S. government, according to Rogers’s financial disclosures. The couple added millions more after Rogers left the House and began working in the industry he had spent years overseeing.
While Rogers is not required to disclose his spouse’s income, their reported “Unearned Income,” including multiple investment funds, dividends, and interest income, soared over those years. They also acquired two mortgages in Maryland and Virginia—neither principal residences.
In 2010, Aegis was named one of only eight private military contractors who were qualified to bid on $10 billion of contracts for the State Department’s Worldwide Protection (WWP) program. The biggest fish, the Kabul Afghanistan Embassy Security contract, first went to another firm but was re-competed and awarded to Aegis LLC.
Kristi Rogers claimed credit for this in a biography later scrubbed from the website of the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, which stated she led “a two-year pursuit and capture strategy to win a five-year, $10 billion contract.” Mike Rogers was appointed Chairman on January 3, 2011; the contract was awarded to Aegis seven months later, on July 29th, 2011.
From Opioids to Intel
Mike Rogers spent his first eight years in Congress as a lead advocate for the opioid industry in Congress, but as the resulting epidemic surged and his longtime patrons came under federal investigation, he pivoted fully to national security following the Tea Party wave of 2010 that swept Republicans to power.
As chair of HPSCI, Rogers had access to sensitive and top secret intelligence that is unavailable to rank-and-file lawmakers, and the position is one of the most powerful in Washington. (Technically, the Appropriations Committee is supposed to have more power over spending decisions in Congress, but legislation now is generally adopted through a so-called “continuing resolution” or an omnibus spending package, bypassing regular order.)
In 2007, Rogers got into a public battle with then-Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Penn.) when Rogers attempted to defund the National Intelligence Drug Center, based in Murtha’s district. Rogers argued the money “takes precious intelligence resources from spies on the ground catching terrorists in places like Fallujah, Iraq, and sends it to bureaucrats in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.” Aegis, of course, was a leading provider of security contracting in Iraq at the time.
Rogers and his wife rose in tandem. By her own account in Washington Exec, Kristi Clemens in 2006 made a pitch to start the U.S. branch of Aegis Defence Ltd, to the company’s board, which included a 5-Star UK Colonel and Winston Churchill’s grandson. It’s not clear whether he and Clemens had met yet. The company made her executive vice president, then president in 2008, chief executive in 2009, president in 2010, and vice chairman in 2011.
Aegis, a UK private military contractor, was founded by Tim Spicer, a controversial figure thanks to three international scandals involving his first company, Sandline. The Nation reported in 2004 that Spicer had been caught “violating a UN Arms embargo in Sierra Leone and unwittingly triggering a coup in Papua New Guinea,” prompting its military to arrest Spicer. They found $400,000 in cash on him. It was a surprise to many in Iraq and D.C. that Spicer’s new firm, Aegis Defence Services, landed a major $293 million Pentagon contract in 2004 to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq. Five Democratic U.S. senators, led by Ted Kennedy, appealed to Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld to reconsider the award based on Spicer’s scandals, but were rebuffed. By 2007, with Kristi Rogers in place at Aegis U.S., the largest single contract—for $475 million dollars—was awarded to Aegis by the Defense Department; it included supporting the Army Corps of Engineers in reconstruction operations in Iraq.
The 2004 contract made Aegis head of the regional operating centers and later the Contractor Operations Cell (CONOC), responsible for providing situational awareness and coordinating the movements of private security contractors. That put Aegis in charge of coordination of all the other private military contractors in Iraq, earning Aegis’s Spicer the moniker of “the general in charge of all of the private contractors,”
Under Aegis ostensible oversight, Blackwater contractors were involved in the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, in which 17 innocent Iraqi civilians were killed. In 2005, Aegis drew international attention when one of their gunmen posted a video of their vehicle wildly shooting at civilian vehicles en route from the Green Zone to the airport, set to the Elvis song, “Mystery Train.” At least one civilian was reported killed.
None of it stopped the company’s rise. Aegis was awarded the Armed Contractor Oversight Directorate, or ACOD, contract in 2009 for Afghanistan, which oversees contractors. That produced a glaring conflict of interest—overseeing other contractors while also bidding against them—and one former ACOD whistleblower ordered what’s called a “Cure Notice,” effectively calling out a conflict-of-interest and demanding it be fixed.
A congressional commission set up to root out waste and fraud in wartime contracting called Kristi Rogers to testify, but she begged off, citing her honeymoon in spring 2010. One commissioner at the hearing noted that he understood her board had advised her not to attend.
That summer, on June 21, 2010, she testified as Aegis’s president. Commissioner Charles Tiefer put it to her that Aegis personnel “currently operate the CONOC [the center coordinating other armed contractors] in Iraq.” “We support it, yes,” she said.
Kristi Rogers said the whistleblower who had flagged the conflicts of interest was a “disgruntled former employee,” but she admitted the company was forced to terminate its ACOD duties.
Despite the scandals, 20 months later, Aegis landed that $1.017 billion contract to secure the Kabul, Afghanistan Embassy. .
The pursuit of further contracts took Aegis to Libya, where NATO intervention had produced widespread violence with the overthrow of Moamar Gaddafi. Aegis had an intelligence arm called Aegis Advisory Services, in Libya, with a large team in Tripoli that boasted of top security clearance status, and clients which included the world’s elite private intelligence group, Stratfor.
In September 2012, a U.S. compound in Benghazi was sacked, killing four Americans: two private contractors, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and a State Department official. Al Jazeera later reported that Aegis had been bidding for a $5 billion contract to secure all of Libya’s porous borders. In 2014, the conservative group Judicial Watch, relying in part on documents published by WikiLeaks, found that Aegis had been heavily active in Libya since early 2011 and that it had assessed Benghazi in the summer before the attack.
After Benghazi
Republicans spent years investigating the lapses and policy decisions that led to the fatal attack, while Kristi Rogers and her company were walled off from the Intelligence Committee, a spokesperson said at the time. Through its spokesperson Susan Phalan, HPSCI announced a “no interaction policy with Mrs. Rogers or any Aegis employee.” (The no interaction policy presumably did not apply between husband and wife.)
Judicial Watch’s Micah Morrison was unsparing in its criticism of Rogers in a report headlined “Unraveling Benghazi: Is Mike Rogers Part of the Problem?”:
Sussing out the White House’s response to Benghazi is a critical step in clearing the shadows from the incident, but there are other players in the drama as well, including Rep. Rogers, and possibly also including a private military contracting firm that until recently was run by his wife, Kristi Rogers. Mike and Kristi Rogers are quintessential Washington insiders. A seven-term Republican from Michigan, Mike Rogers climbed the political ladder to become chairman of the Intelligence Committee in January 2011. Kristi Rogers, after years of government service in mid-level administrative positions, moved to the private sector, joining the British-based security contractor Aegis Defense Services to help open its U.S. subsidiary. The newsletter Intelligence Online noted that thanks to Ms. Rogers’ efforts, “Aegis won several major contracts with the U.S. administration.”
A spokesperson for the House Intelligence Committee noted that “strictly observed and enforced” policies required “that there should be no interaction with Mrs. Rogers on any matter relating to the official business of the House” and “no interaction between the Committee and any representative of Aegis.” There is no evidence of wrong-doing by Rep. Rogers or Aegis. Indeed, the outlines of the story are more suggestive of “right-doing,” Washington-style: an insider’s game of covert operations and corporate profits played out in the gray areas of law and policy.
That spring—though, as Judicial Watch noted, there was no direct evidence of criminal wrongdoing—Rogers announced he would not be running for re-election, and his wife left Aegis. Rogers went into corporate and cyber security work, and was floated as CIA director in the first Trump administration.
Leading right-wing pollster and operative Dick Morris, who had questioned Mike Rogers’s oversight of Benghazi, wanted to make sure that conservatives never forgot about his work. Rogers had fought the formation of a special committee to investigate it, and conservatives believed he was slow-walking the probe to protect his wife’s company. “The first to go—and most deserving—is former Congressman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers,” Morris wrote. “Slated, some say, to be the new director of the CIA, Rogers was a key force in obstructing and delaying the Benghazi investigation in order to shield his wife, Kristi, from scrutiny.”
Morris went on: “Aegis had won several major contracts, likely through Mrs. Rogers’ influence as the wife of the House Intel Committee. Although not directly responsible for security at Benghazi, her firm had significant responsibilities in the area.”
The late Sen. Lindsey Graham called the HPSCI report on Benghazi “full of crap,” while former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova went on WMAL Radio in D.C. during the hearings and accused Mike Rogers of “sabotaging the Benghazi hearings” and went so far as to warn future Republicans to pay attention to the “dishonorable conduct of Mike Rogers.”
Judicial Watch’s Micah Morrison called the couple the “quintessential Washington insiders.” In November 2012, the Rogers family took a six-day, all-expenses-paid trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina, costing its sponsors, the Franklin Center and the Ripon Center, $23,540.
Rogers announced his departure on the Paul W. Smith morning drive show on WJR Radio in Detroit on March 28, 2014, saying that he would finish his term and become a talk radio host on Cumulus Radio, WJR’s syndicator. On the show, Rogers said he always believed in “a citizen legislature,” that he had a private-sector career before his public service, and that he intended to return to one.
After his years spent regulating the surveillance industry as chair of the Intelligence Committee, Rogers began working with multiple cybersecurity companies.
Rogers ran unsuccessfully for the Michigan Senate in 2024 and is running again in 2026. His Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, has repeatedly attacked him for making up to $14 million in the private sector from the types of companies he was tasked with regulating.
The Rogers campaign did not respond to requests for comment, but Rogers has previously insisted that his work in Congress and his wife’s work as head of Aegis U.S. were kept separate.