MO Democrat Lucas Kunce files report detailing finances. How does Josh Hawley compare?

U.S. Senate candidate Lucas Kunce this week filed his first financial disclosure form since 2021, revealing that the Missouri Democrat is collecting rent from a $930,000 house in Washington, D.C.

The new report showed that Kunce has two properties, including the $930,000 house in Washington, which he is renting out and includes a roughly $765,000 mortgage. His primary residence is listed as a $180,000 two-home lot in Independence with a roughly $153,000 mortgage, the report showed. Kunce also collected rent on a portion of the Independence property.

Kunce’s combined rental income from the two properties was between $30,000 and $100,000, the report showed.

While in the Marines, Kunce was stationed at the Pentagon in 2016, conducting arms control negotiations with Russia. In 2018, he purchased the Washington property with a roughly $805,000 loan from the Department of Veterans Affairs with no money down, Connor Lounsbury, senior adviser to the Kunce campaign, told The Star.

“He bought a home there with a roughly $805k VA loan with no money down while still serving. He still owes over $700k on the house,” Lounsbury said in an email. “Lucas’ family went bankrupt as a child. He got to college on a Pell Grant. And he served his country for over a decade in the U.S. Marines.”

Kunce was not previously collecting rent on the property and therefore was not required to report the Washington home on his 2021 disclosure form. Craig Holman, a campaign ethics expert with the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, told The Star that personal real estate only needs to be reported if it produces income, such as rental income. Incumbent Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, whom Kunce is challenging in 2024, also did not include his roughly $1.3 million home in Virginia in his most recent filing.

Spokespeople for Hawley did not immediately respond to questions about his report.

Lawmakers and candidates for federal office are required to file the personal financial disclosure forms, which detail their assets, financial interests and liabilities. The reports are intended to help the public monitor potential conflicts of interest.

Largely due to the inclusion of the Washington property, Kunce’s total reported assets have increased in the two years since his previous report in 2021 and now total between $1.15 million and $1.27 million.

The reports show that Hawley, who filed his most recent report in May 2023, is wealthier than Kunce in terms of total assets, which range from $1.87 million to $3.4 million. Hawley’s liabilities, according to the report, total between $500,000 and $1 million due to a joint mortgage incurred in 2021.

Kunce has effectively been campaigning for the past three years after launching a bid in the 2022 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in early 2021, eventually losing to Anheuser-Busch heir Trudy Busch Valentine. In January, he launched a campaign to oust Hawley.

Kunce’s report is his first one since 2021 as he has filed for three previous extensions. Hawley has also previously filed for extensions twice in 2017 and once in 2020.

“Unfortunately there are very few penalties for not filing timely financial disclosure forms,” said Aaron Scherb, the senior legislative director for Common Cause, a nonprofit that focuses on government accountability. “Because members of Congress themselves were the ones who created these rules initially, it’s hard to get them to toughen standards that affect themselves.

The release of Kunce’s report comes as he is mounting a challenge to Hawley. He faces a crowded Democratic primary against St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell and state Sen. Karla May from St. Louis.

Neither Bell nor May have filed reports. Bell, who has been in the race since June, failed to meet the 30-day deadline to file his financial disclosure form. His campaign, in a statement to The Star, said it was an oversight and that the report would be filed by the end of the week.

“Wesley has consistently filed financial disclosures since he became a candidate for prosecutor, with the last one filed as recently as May 2023,” a spokesperson for Bell’s campaign said.

May did not respond to a request for comment from The Star about when she plans to file her report.

In his 2021 report Kunce’s assets totaled between $251,000 and $617,000. The 2021 report showed he had also collected between $2,500 and $5,000 in rent from a rental property in Independence and between $10,000 and $30,000 in capital gains after selling two rental properties in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

The most recent report shows that Kunce has also taken on more liabilities since his previous report and now includes the mortgages on his Washington and Independence properties, totaling roughly $918,000. His previous report included two mortgages and a line of credit that were all paid off.

Kunce, according to his most recent report, earned $75,500 doing remote work as the director of national security at the American Economic Liberties Project, a Washington-based nonprofit that pushes back against concentrated corporate power.

Kunce, who is listed as an employee at the nonprofit from January 2021 through February 2022 and then again from September 2022 to January 2023, has put a pause on working there while on the campaign trail. He was previously paid $120,750 for his work for the nonprofit, which started in 2020, according to his previous report.

The Democratic candidate also reported earning $10,000 for contributions and advising from Big Newsletter LLC, a Virginia-based newsletter run by Matt Stoller, the nonprofit’s director of research. According to its website, the newsletter takes readers “on a journey through the anti-monopoly revolution that is changing our world.”

Stoller is a progressive activist and outspoken critic of corporate power. Despite his ties to Kunce, Stoller has a long history of boosting Hawley’s anti-monopoly positions.

Hawley’s most recent report indicated he received little money outside of his Senate salary, aside from interest from his family’s mutual funds. The report shows two royalty agreements with Regnery Publishing, the publisher of Hawley’s books “The Tyranny of Big Tech” and “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.” But the report does not show how much the agreements were worth.

It also showed some of the work his wife, Erin Morrow Hawley, is doing.

She works with the Alliance Defending Freedom and has been an attorney in several of the conservative Christian law firm’s high-profile federal cases, including an effort to end the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, the first of two drugs used in a medication abortion.

She also writes a column for God’s World Publications and teaches at Regent University in Virginia.

Hawley has raised more money and has more cash on hand than all of his potential Democratic opponents headed into the 2024 campaign. Kunce, who entered the race on Jan. 6 of this year in an attempt to draw attention to Hawley’s actions on the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, has outraised Bell and May so far in the campaign.