In this U.S. Air Force handout, a GBU-43/B bomb, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb, is launched November 21, 2003 at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. MOAB is a 21,700-pound that was dropped from a plane at 20, 000 feet.

Despite Claiming to Divest, Ro Khanna’s Wife Held Onto Some Defense Stocks

by
in Sludge
on August 19, 2021

In December 2020, Ritu Khanna, the wife of Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), divested from several weapons companies after Sludge published an article revealing that her fortune included defense contractor stocks worth as much as $376,000. The stock sales were celebrated by the anti-war group Code Pink, which had run a campaign calling on Khanna to divest. 

However, while Ritu Khanna did divest from many of her defense industry holdings, new disclosures reveal that she held onto some of them, and that the couple has since purchased more defense contractor stock for a dependent child. 

Ritu Khanna still owns between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in Honeywell, a multinational conglomerate that has been involved in nuclear weapons development for decades. The company’s Kansas City National Security Campus manufactures 85 percent of the non-nuclear components that go into the nuclear stockpile, according to its website. Honeywell has been a major subcontractor for Northrop Grumman’s Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile project, the land-based component of the U.S. military’s nuclear triad, and will continue as a subcontractor on the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent missiles system, which will replace the Minuteman III fleet. 

Khanna’s financial disclosure shows that Ritu Khanna also kept her stock in Leidos, worth between $15,000 and $50,000, as first noted by reporter Robbie Jaegar. Leidos, which is primarily known for providing national security agency services, owns warhead maker Dynetics, which worked for the Air Force to design the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb that was used in Afghanistan in 2017. The company recently won a contract to make hypersonic glide body prototypes for the Army, which could serve as the basis for the U.S. military’s future hypersonic missiles. The Army also recently gave Dynetics a contract to build a 100-kilowatt laser weapon, a project it is undertaking in partnership with Lockheed Martin. 

According to a periodic transaction report Ro Khanna filed on August 13, Honeywell stock worth between $1,000 and $15,000 was purchased for one of the couple’s dependent children. 

Ro Khanna declined to comment on the Leidos and Honeywell stock, but told Sludge that his wife “has separate property before marriage.” 

The Khanna household’s previous investments placed the congressman third out of the top three dozen House members in the value of stock held in defense contractors, according to our analysis.

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