Exactly how far-and how far back– does the Congressional Insider Trading Scandal go?
Answer: This isn’t your business. Get back to work.
Lots of recent reports on this new “scandal”; problem is … it’s not that new. In fact, it’s been going on pretty consistently over the last few decades.
Close to 13 years ago I went apoplectic that Congress had passed a set of “rules” that effectively allowed them to bypass Insider Trading Laws-Insider Trading is defined as having and acting on knowledge that the general public does not have access to.
In short, the rules set up “punishments” and “oversights” that were so minuscule that for all practical purposes it became legal for these clowns to have no restrictions to do whatever they want-think of an “Insufficient Funds” fee being lowered to $. 05 if you need a comparison.
House Democratic boss Nancy Pelosi defended bloated member stock portfolios in a press conference Thursday. “We’re a free-market economy,” Pelosi told reporters. Members of Congress “should be able to participate in that.”
However, the media has been spouting reports that over 49 of our elected leaders have been using insider trading to make their fortunes-these are the folks that decide which laws get passed, and therefore have a pretty good idea of which industries might be affected.
Long and short, this isn’t JUST insider trading-they actually CAN affect businesses.
Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove) led the Empire State violators. The congressman — now aspiring to be governor — made roughly 300 stock trades worth an average of $3.2 million to $11 million between 2017 and 2020, according to a review by the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. Citigroup, AT&T, and Baidu were among the companies it owned.
Throughout this period Suozzi failed to file periodic transaction reports, which the STOCK Act requires for each transaction.
The center asked the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate Suozzi. “When members of Congress trade individual stocks and fail to disclose those trades, they break the law and diminish the public’s trust in government,” the center’s letter stated.
The OCE declined to comment.
The Insider’s new report, “Conflicted Congress,” explores how members of the US House and Senate have violated their own ethical standards, avoided consequences, and blinded Americans to instances in which their personal finances conflict with their public duties.
In all, Insider spent hundreds of hours over five months reviewing nearly 9,000 financial-disclosure reports for every sitting lawmaker and their top-ranking staffers. Reporters conducted hundreds of interviews, including those with some of the nation’s most powerful leaders.”
So, what did we learn?:
49 members of Congress and 182 senior-level congressional staffers who have violated a federal conflicts-of-interest law.
Nearly 75 federal lawmakers who held stocks in COVID-19 vaccine makers Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, or Pfizer in 2020, with many of them buying or selling these stocks in the early weeks of the pandemic.
15 lawmakers tasked with shaping US defense policy that actively invest in military contractors.
16 lawmakers who buy and hold tobacco company stock, including some who have publicly fought smoking.
Members who regularly chide “the media” but personally pour their money into at least one of the nation’s largest news media or social media companies, including Facebook, Twitter, Comcast, Disney, and The New York Times Co.
More than a dozen environmentally-minded Democrats who invest in fossil fuel companies or other corporations with concerning environmental track records.
Senators, House members, and top Capitol Hill staffers who will help decide whether the government regulates cryptocurrency — and are themselves invested in bitcoin and altcoins.
Despite the possibility of conflict of interest between legislative duties and personal finances, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi scoffed at the idea of banning congressional lawmakers and their spouses from owning individual company shares.
“No,” Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters at a news conference where she was asked whether she would support such a prohibition. “We’re a free-market economy,” she said. “They should be able to participate in that.” (Note the switch between “We’re” and “They” …)
It should be noted that lawmakers that are in a position to both inside trade AND affect the economy as a whole-unlike the rest of us. So no, Nancy, this is NOT a “Free-market” issue-at least as far as our Congress is concerned. What should also be noted here is that her answer had only to do with what the Congress Folk wanted-and made no reference to the will of the people.
Asked about a Business Insider investigative report this week on share purchases, Pelosi dismissed the idea of a ban on stock purchases ownership by lawmakers, and after controversies over stock purchases by a number of senators since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Business Insider series found that 49 members of Congress and 182 senior-level congressional staffers had violated what is known as the STOCK Act, which requires that individuals and their family members disclose sales and purchases of stocks and bonds within 45 days.
The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, signed into law in 2012, is supposed to prevent lawmakers and staffers from trading on the information they gain through their jobs and from engaging in conflicts of interest.
But violations of the STOCK Act, if sanctioned at all, usually result in fines of just $200. Gonna re[peat this several times. in case someone thinks that a $200 fine is going to stop anyone from making tens of thousands on a transaction.
Business Insider reported (this is straight from their site):
”Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) took months to report her husband’s five-figure deal in a youth-focused polling company.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) was weeks and months late reporting nearly 130 stock trades from January-May.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was 16 months late in disclosing that his wife bought stock in a biopharmaceutical company that manufactures an antiviral COVID-19 treatment.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a retired astronaut, failed to disclose on time his exercising of a stock option on an investment in a company that’s developing a supersonic passenger aircraft
Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), failed to disclose dozens of stock trades made during 2020 and early 2021, doing so only after questions from Insider.”
“We have a responsibility to report” stock trades, Pelosi said Wednesday. Keep in mind that these folks HAVE insider knowledge
Speaker said she was not familiar with Business Insider’s findings. “But If people aren’t reporting [stock trades], they should be,” Pelosi added. No kidding.
Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, blasted Pelosi’s reference to the “free market economy” in the first of a series of tweets about the lack of a ban on stock ownership by lawmakers.
“It’s a ridiculous comment!” Shaub wrote. “She might as well have said ‘let them eat cake.’ Sure, it’s a free-market economy. But your average schmuck doesn’t get confidential briefings from government experts chock full of nonpublic information directly related to the price of stocks.”
In another tweet, Shaub wrote, “In an objective world, free of politics, members of Congress would be mocked for the absurdly weak ethics rules they’ve written for themselves.”
In October, the Federal Reserve announced a wide-ranging ban on officials of the central bank owning individual stocks and bonds.
That ban came on the heels of the resignations of two Federal Reserve regional presidents, Robert Kaplan of Dallas and Eric Rosengren of Boston, after disclosures that they had traded individual securities in 2020. Their trades came as the coronavirus rocked markets, and while the Fed itself was engaging in massive purchases of assets aimed at keeping markets stable.
A number of good-government groups and some lawmakers have called for a ban on owning stocks, or mandating that members of Congress put their financial holdings in a blind trust while they are in office.
In allowing lawmakers to continue to own index funds, which track sectors of the financial market, one way to allow them to get investment returns is to limit the possibility of benefiting from information they obtain about individual companies or being perceived as benefiting from such information.
Here are some other goodies- Some other violations were made by:
Rep. Mo Brooks ran for US Senate and failed to disclose a sale of Pfizer stock, $50,000.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw disclosed several stocks trades late. They were made at the beginning of the pandemic.
Rep. Brian mast was late disclosing that he had bought up to $100,000 in stock in an aerospace company.
Rep. Kim Schrier was two months late disclosing that her husband bought one million in Apple inc., stock, Sludge, and Forbes shared.
Rep. Tom Suozzi couldn’t file reports on 300 financial transactions.
Rep. Peter Welch was late disclosing the sale of his wife’s ExxonMobil stock.
Rep. Rob Wittman was late disclosing 4 of his stock transactions, including the J & J company.
Rep. Alan Lowenthal was late disclosing his wife’s purchase of a corporate bond in cloud computing and tech company VMware. I hate VMware. So it’s not a surprise that they needed Congressional help to make money in my opinion.
Then-Representative Chris Collins, R-N.Y., has pleaded guilty to federal charges of leaking nonpublic information about a pharmaceutical company’s failed drug trial to his son, shortly before the news sent the company’s stock plummeting.
As a member of Congress, Collins had touted Innate Therapeutics’ prospects for years before joining its board of directors.
Innate also had Collins as its biggest shareholder in early 2016, with nearly 34 million shares, or over 17 percent of the company. At one point, Cameron and Caitlin owned 2.65% of the company, or 5.2 million shares each, making them the third- and fourth-largest shareholders, respectively.
Collins, who had been serving a 26-month prison sentence, was pardoned by President Donald Trump in December 2020, shortly before Trump left office. Collins had been the first member of Congress to endorse Trump’s first run for the White House in 2016.
Last year, federal prosecutors investigated stock sales made in advance of a Covid-sparked market plunge by and connected to Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
Those probes ended without criminal charges being filed. I seem to recall the same results with Hillary’s email issues.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Burr and his brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, as well as Fauth’s wife engaged in insider trading based on nonpublic information Burr had obtained as part of his job. Fauth chairs the National Mediation Board, which facilitates labor-management relations in the railroad and airline industries in the United States.
In August, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky revealed for the first time in a disclosure report that his wife Kelly had purchased shares of drug company Gilead Sciences in early 2020, one day after the first U.S. clinical trial began for Gilead’s remdesivir as a treatment for COVID-19.
The couple had never purchased or sold stock in an individual company in the past decade. Paul made his disclosure after the deadline for reporting it under the STOCK Act had passed by more than 16 months.
Like Paul, Tuberville made his disclosure after the expiration of the deadline set by the STOCK Act.
These are the clowns running this place, insisting on vaccine passports and “Tax the Rich™” and “The other guys are the bad ones™” and “Everything’s Trumps Fault™” and …
You are probably starting to get the picture- and it’s BOTH sides. Quis custodies ipsos custodies?