In 2021, Nevada Rep. Susie Lee, one of the wealthiest Democrats in Congress, was embroiled in scandal and facing multiple ethics complaints over serious allegations that she’d rigged the system to benefit her husband, a senior casino executive, during the COVID pandemic.
Then, in May of 2021, Lee announced she was ending her marriage, giving her an effective rebuttal to her critics. She responded to unflattering reports on her ethics issues in the New York Times and Mother Jones, for example, by referencing the split and pinning any shady transactions on her soon-to-be-former husband.
But Lee didn't formally file for divorce until months later, in December 2021, records show. She then quietly stayed married for more than three years. It wasn’t until last month, only weeks before the election, that she finalized her high-net worth divorce from Dan Lee, the CEO of Full House Resorts, which operates casinos across the country. As a result, Lee will not have to disclose her new financial holdings until well after the November election.
The divorce proceedings, while largely sealed, appear to have been contentious, and legal filings show that Lee has continued to benefit from her husband’s wealth and could be receiving a substantial portion of his assets. In her most recent financial disclosures, Lee said she had a net worth as high as $21.8 million. A House member’s salary is $174,000 per year. The product of a working-class family who worked for nonprofits before being elected to Congress, Lee is believed to have become wealthy largely due to her marriage.
Lee settled her divorce on Sept. 12, Nevada court records show, resolving a more than three-year-long, closed-door court battle that started back in May 2021, when she publicly announced her marriage was over. Though a Nevada court placed many of Lee’s divorce records under seal, the filings that are available indicate the division of the couple’s family fortune, which has been the subject of several scandals since Lee assumed office in 2019, was a major point of contention throughout their lengthy court battle.
Both Lee and her ex-husband requested in their divorce filings that they equally divide their household’s community property. And there was a lot of property to dole out between the two. Of Lee’s net worth, which she had disclosed could be as much as $21.8 million, $8.6 million was held in joint accounts with her ex-husband.
That includes upwards of $5 million in stock of Full House, her husband’s employer. Just before Lee announced her divorce in May 2021, she came under fire for her successful effort one year prior to push the federal government to allow casinos to be eligible for the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program, a move that enabled Full House to secure $5.6 million in taxpayer funds during the pandemic. Dan Lee’s income from Full House skyrocketed after the company received those taxpayer funds. In 2020, his total compensation package from Full House was $731,000, according to the company’s SEC proxy statement. The following year, it more than tripled to nearly $2.6 million.
Lee also faced several watchdog group complaints in 2021 and 2022 over her failure to properly disclose millions of dollars' worth of her and her ex-husband’s stock trades.
It’s unclear if Lee retains any interest in Full House now that her divorce has been settled. The financial terms from her divorce agreement were placed under seal, and if Lee secures reelection in November, she won’t have to disclose her new financial standing to the public until August 2025, when the next round of congressional financial disclosure statements are due.
Lee demanded her ex-husband pay for all medical and dental expenses for one of their children, who was 17 years old at the time she filed for divorce. (A second child, a daughter, was an adult at the time the divorce documents were filed.) But Dan Lee said in his response that he was only obligated to pay one half of such expenses, adding that they had signed a premarital agreement that already dictates how their vast financial holdings should be distributed upon the dissolution of their marriage.
Lee, curiously, didn’t mention any premarital agreements in her original divorce filing in December 2021, which came months after she publicly announced the split. An August 2023 entry in the court docket for Lee’s divorce case centered around the "validity of pre-martial [sic] agreement" suggests she disagreed with her ex-husband on the validity of their prenup. This kind of dispute is a common feature of a high net worth divorce in which one spouse’s wealth vastly exceeds the other’s.
The allotment of a congressional member's divorce settlement "is an interesting topic that rarely comes up," Kendra Arnold, the executive director of the watchdog group Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, told the Washington Free Beacon. "It is fundamental that Members disclose their spouse’s financial information because others may easily give gifts or pay income to a spouse in order to influence a Member, and a Member has a legal claim to a spouse’s assets."
"In divorce cases, regardless of whether a spouse receives a specific marital asset, they may ultimately still benefit from that asset because it increased the value of the property to be divided," Arnold added.
Lee was considered the most vulnerable Democrat in the Nevada House delegation heading into the 2024 election cycle, but recent polls indicate she’s on track to win her third term in November. An Emerson College poll in August found her leading her Republican opponent, Drew Johnson, by 13 points. Lee is also dominating Johnson in fundraising, entering August with nearly $3 million cash on hand compared with the Republican’s paltry $50,000. Johnson has called Lee "the most corrupt member of Congress." Lee, in turn, called Johnson "an unstable and unhinged election denier." She has refused to debate the Republican.
The sheer size of Lee’s wealth has dogged her since she launched her political career in 2016. She came in a distant third place Democratic primary for Nevada’s Fourth Congressional District that year after the powerful Las Vegas Culinary Workers Union attacked Lee for claiming to come from a humble working-class family while owning 14 rental properties across the country with her husband, in addition to a five-bedroom home in Las Vegas and a vacation home in Wyoming.
In 2021, a Business Insider report on conflicts of interest in Congress gave Lee a "danger" rating, its lowest level on the scale. It’s unclear whether Lee retained interest in any of her and her husband’s rental properties following their split.
Lee and her ex-husband married in 1995, but by 2021 their relationship had deteriorated beyond the point of repair, both disclosed in their respective divorce filings.
"The parties are now incompatible in marriage, such that their likes, dislikes, and tastes have become so widely divergent that they can no longer live together as husband and wife," Lee wrote in her complaint for divorce, which was filed in a Nevada court in December 2021, over half a year after she announced to the press she was separating from her husband.
Dan Lee concurred with Lee’s sentiment in his response to her divorce filing, saying there was "no possibility of reconciliation" between the two.
Lee did not return a request for comment.