House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocks efforts from bipartisan lawmakers to prevent members of Congress from engaging in individual stock picks.
QUICK FACTS:
- Nancy Pelosi is attempting to quash bipartisan efforts to ban stock trading by Congressional lawmakers, The New York Post reports.
- Pelosi and her husband have accumulated as much as $30 million from bets on the Big Tech firms she is responsible for regulating.
- The Post points out how last month, House Speaker Pelosi had disclosed that she and her husband had made millions in call options for stocks including Google, Salesforce, Micron Technology, and Roblox.
- Insiders say Pelosi has slow-walked efforts to rein in Big Tech, Jeff Hauser—a self-proclaimed progressive Democrat and founder and director of the Revolving Door Project—told The Post that key “policy makers can be rich but they shouldn’t own individual companies.”
- Hauser went on to say that when elected officials pick stocks, it “gets worrisome about whether legislators have access to insider information or whether your stock purchases will consciously or unconsciously impact policy making.”
‘SP’ FOR SPOUSE:
- “The Speaker does not own any stocks,” Hammill told The Post. “As you can see from the required disclosures, with which the Speaker fully cooperates, these transactions are marked ‘SP’ for Spouse. The Speaker has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions.”
- Walter Shaub, the former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics during both the Obama and Trump administrations, called this defense “absolutely insulting.”
- “The idea that the stocks are in her husband’s name is a complete red herring,” Shaub told The Post. “Unless members of Congress are willing to wear microphones around the clock when they’re having dinner with their spouses and going to bed, the public has no way of knowing what information they intentionally or inadvertently shared.”
BACKGROUND:
- Pelosi is one of the richest members of Congress, notes The Post, with an estimated net worth of more than $106 million.
- Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, is a businessman who heads up a venture capital and investment firm called Financial Leasing Services.
- Mr. Pelosi has made countless bets on high-profile companies his wife is supposed to regulate, like Amazon, Apple, and Google, The Post reports.
- The Pelosis’ current holdings include between $5 million and $25 million of shares in both Amazon and Apple, as well as between $1 million and $5 million worth of Google stock options, according to their most recent disclosures.
