Despite their influence and extensive access to information, members of Congress should buy and sell stocks with few restrictions.
A Latest York Times evaluation found that 97 lawmakers or their relations bought or sold financial assets over a three-year span in industries that could possibly be affected by their legislative committee work.
Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama and a member of the agriculture committee, recurrently reported buying and selling contracts tied to cattle prices starting last yr, whilst the panel, by Mr. Tuberville’s own account, had “been talking in regards to the cattle markets.”
Representative Bob Gibbs, an Ohio Republican on the House Oversight Committee, reported buying shares of the pharmaceutical company AbbVie in 2020 and 2021, while the committee was investigating AbbVie and five rivals over high drug prices.
The timing of 1 trade by the wife of Representative Alan Lowenthal, Democrat of California, was especially striking: His disclosure statement said she had sold Boeing shares on March 5, 2020 — in the future before a House committee on which he sits released damaging findings on the corporate’s handling of its 737 Max jet, which was involved in two fatal crashes.
These lawmakers — all of whom defended the transactions as proper — are amongst 97 current senators or representatives who reported trades by themselves or immediate relations in stocks or other financial assets that intersected with the work of committees on which they serve, in keeping with an intensive evaluation of trades from the years 2019 to 2021 by The Latest York Times.
The potential for conflicts in stock trading by members of Congress — and their alternative to this point to not impose stricter limits on themselves — has long drawn criticism, especially when particularly blatant cases emerge. However the Times evaluation demonstrates the size of the problem: Over the three-year period, greater than 3,700 trades reported by lawmakers from each parties posed potential conflicts between their public responsibilities and personal funds.
In some cases, the transactions seem like routine or to have only a tangential connection to any influence the lawmaker might need had on a problem. In others, the trades were conducted by trusts or brokers who, the lawmakers say, were operating with none instructions or input from them.
But many instances show how legislative work and investment decisions can overlap in ways in which at a minimum can leave the looks of a conflict and that sometimes form a troubling pattern — even in the event that they technically fall inside the foundations.
Under a 2012 law often known as the STOCK Act, members of Congress are allowed to purchase and sell stocks, bonds and other financial instruments so long as they don’t trade on inside information and disclose any transactions by themselves or immediate relations valued at $1,000 or more inside 45 days.
Like everyone else, members of Congress are subject to laws against insider trading. Even knowledge that might fall wanting the legal definition of inside information, though, has the potential to create ethical dilemmas for members of Congress who, on any given day, might have the option to glean insights through legislative work, classified briefings or meetings with constituents, donors, corporate executives, regulators and other government officials.
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Each the House and the Senate have been attempting to develop laws to tighten the foundations, but whether a bill might be passed by each chambers and make it to President Biden’s desk this yr stays unsure, despite rare bipartisan support.
“The American people don’t want us day trading for profit, and fascinating in lively trading of the very equities which might be connected to the policies that we’re deciding on and voting on daily,” said Representative Chip Roy, a Texas Republican. He’s co-sponsoring a bill within the House that might require members to place individual stocks, bonds and lots of other financial assets in a blind trust, a portfolio that’s managed by an out of doors adviser with no involvement by the owner.
To look at the potential for conflicts, The Times used a comprehensive database called Capitol Trades, which was compiled from congressional trading disclosures by the German financial data firm 2iQ Research.
The Times then matched the trades against committee assignments, hearings and investigations to construct an image of how members’ congressional work and their personal financial transactions could potentially intersect.
Some committees have broad purview over matters like tax policy, which affects every company and individual within the U.S. economy but which the Times evaluation wouldn’t have flagged. And members of Congress have wide-ranging influence, and access to sensitive information, that their committee assignments may not reflect.
Yet even with those omissions, the three,700 potentially conflicted trades identified by the evaluation amounted to greater than 10 percent of the transactions by members of Congress within the Capitol Trades database through the three years.
The evaluation shows that 13 lawmakers, including Mr. Gibbs and other members of the House oversight panel, reported that they or immediate relations had bought or sold shares of corporations that were under investigation by their committees between 2019 and 2021, encompassing years by which Democrats controlled the House and control of the Senate swung from Republicans to Democrats.
Bob Gibbs
Representative, R-Ohio
Reported trades in 36 corporations;
16 potential conflicts
Oversight Committee
AbbVie*Johnson & JohnsonMerckPfizer
*
Traded while the committee was investigating the corporate
Oversight Subcommittee on Environment
Exxon MobilAmerican Electric PowerBPEmerson ElectricEnergy TransferEnergy Transfer PartnersMarathon OilMarathon Petroleum
Transportation Committee
BoeingQuantumScapeFordUnion Pacific Corp.
It also showed that 44 of the 50 members of Congress who were most lively within the markets bought or sold securities in corporations over which their committee assignments could give them a point of data or influence.
Probably the most vexing issues for lawmakers is trading by their immediate relations, a few of whom have independent wealth and careers.
The 97 members the Times evaluation identified don’t include Speaker Nancy Pelosi; her disclosure filings weren’t flagged because she doesn’t sit on any legislative committees. Her husband, Paul Pelosi, is an actual estate and technology investor who reported buying and selling between $25 million and $81 million value of stocks, options and other financial assets between 2019 and 2021, in keeping with Ms. Pelosi’s filings. Amongst them were investments in high-profile corporations like Alphabet — the parent company of Google — which might be recurrently the topic of congressional and regulatory scrutiny.
The husband of Representative Carol Miller, Republican of West Virginia, bought shares within the pharmaceutical company AbbVie through the investigation into drug pricing by the House oversight panel while she was serving on the committee, in keeping with Ms. Miller’s disclosure statement.
So did the wife and youngsters of one other member of that committee, Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, his filings show. Mr. Khanna’s relations bought or sold shares in not only AbbVie through the committee’s review, but in addition in those of seven other corporations while they were under scrutiny by the oversight panel or other committees on which Mr. Khanna sat.
Mr. Khanna, whose wife, Ritu Ahuja Khanna, is the daughter of Monte Ahuja, the founding father of a successful automotive equipment company, reported that his wife and youngsters — who’re young and whose assets are traded by a trust — bought or sold securities no less than 10,500 times within the three-year period The Times studied.
Mr. Khanna said in an interview that he never traded himself and was uninvolved within the trading of his relations’ assets. Mr. Khanna said he favored an entire ban on trading by members, but for relations, he said he thought a “highly diversified trust” that’s managed by an outsider — the arrangement utilized by his wife and young children — was an ethical solution.
“If someone’s coming into a wedding with independent resources, I feel that’s the suitable solution to cope with the conflict,” he said.
Ro Khanna
Representative, D-Calif.
Reported trades in 897 corporations;
149 potential conflicts
Agriculture Committee
Deere & Co.Mondelez InternationalArcher Daniels MidlandIBMCortevaKelloggKraft HeinzConagra BrandsGeneral MillsFMC Corp.Hormel FoodsSyscoMcCormick & Co.Pilgrim’s PrideSmuckerTyson FoodsCampbell SoupHershey Co.Mosaic Co.US FoodsCF IndustriesLamb WestonPost HoldingsScotts Miracle-Gro
Agriculture Subcommittee on Commodity Exchanges, Energy and Credit
CME GroupIntercontinental Exchange
Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock and Foreign Agriculture
Idexx LaboratoriesMcDonald’s
Armed Services Committee
AmazonAlphabetBoeingGeneral ElectricOracleBWX TechnologiesHoneywellGeneral DynamicsNorthrop GrummanRaytheon TechnologiesL3Harris TechnologiesRaytheon Co.TeleflexTextronHexcel Corp.Huntington Ingalls IndustriesWoodwardHeico Corp.Howmet AerospaceSpirit AeroSystemsL3 TechnologiesOshkosh Corp.
Armed Services Committee
Oversight Committee
Lockheed Martin*TransDigm
*
Traded during investigation
Armed Services Committee
Oversight Committee
Agriculture Committee
Microsoft
Armed Services Committee
Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations
Leidos
Oversight Committee
MerckEli LillyWalgreens Boots AllianceAbbVie*Biogen*TwitterAmgen*Vertex PharmaceuticalsBristol Myers SquibbRegeneron PharmaceuticalsAlexion PharmaceuticalsGilead SciencesCapital OneViatrisIncyteAllerganModernaSeagenPerrigoBioMarin PharmaceuticalCelgene*Nektar TherapeuticsJazz PharmaceuticalsCatalentHorizon TherapeuticsAstraZenecaBluebird BioIonis PharmaceuticalsNeurocrine BiosciencesOrganonSage TherapeuticsUnited TherapeuticsAlnylam PharmaceuticalsBioNTechExelixisIntercept PharmaceuticalsNovartis*Ultragenyx
*
Traded during investigation
Oversight Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy
PfizerJohnson & Johnson*Intuitive SurgicalAltria Group*MedtronicPhilip Morris InternationalBecton, Dickinson and CompanyEdwards LifesciencesAbbott LaboratoriesBoston ScientificStrykerAbiomedBaxter InternationalZimmer BiometResMedHologicVarian Medical SystemsCantel MedicalDexcomInogen
*
Traded during investigation
Oversight Subcommittee on Environment
Exxon MobilChevron3M CompanyDominion EnergyEmerson ElectricAmetek Inc.GeneracDuPontPhillips 66Eaton Corp.Nextera EnergyRockwell AutomationSouthern Co.American Electric PowerBaker HughesCMS EnergyConocoPhillipsConsolidated EdisonCoterra EnergyDuke EnergyEOG ResourcesEversource EnergyExelonKinder MorganMarathon PetroleumPioneer Natural ResourcesPublic Service Enterprise GroupSchlumberger Ltd.Sempra EnergySensata TechnologiesValero EnergyWilliams CorporationsXcel EnergyBrookfield InfrastructureBrookfield Renewable Corp.Sunrun
Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations
VMware
Note: Stock purchases and sales were made by trusts within the names of Mr. Khanna’s wife and young children.
Whether legislators’ privileged position actually yields financial advantages to those that play the markets is just not clear. Although some observers have pointed to specific examples of members who appeared to have made a profit, STOCK Act disclosures often provide insufficient information to make that calculation: They show only wide ranges of values, do not need to specify whether a transaction yielded a profit or a loss and sometimes don’t show each a purchase order and a sale.
But a Dartmouth College study published earlier this yr said the precise stocks that members of Congress reported buying and selling between 2012 and 2020 didn’t, on average, subsequently perform any higher or worse than other, similar stocks.
“You can’t rule out that there’s some serious insider trading occurring,” said Bruce I. Sacerdote, an economics professor who was a co-author of the study. “What of course is on average they don’t do particularly well, and these House members and senators could be higher served in the event that they were just in index funds.”
A Troubling Recent History
Legal and ethical questions on securities trading by members of Congress have surfaced repeatedly in recent times.
In 2020, Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, was investigated together with three other senators by the Justice Department for selling stocks after a personal briefing on the potential harms of the coronavirus. The “well-timed stock sales” allowed Mr. Burr to avert no less than $87,000 in losses, in keeping with a recently unsealed affidavit utilized by the federal government to acquire a search warrant for the senator’s phone in 2020. But charges were never filed and the investigation was eventually closed, as were the investigations into his colleagues. The status of a separate Securities and Exchange Commission review into Mr. Burr is unclear.
A running investigation by the web site Insider that began last yr reported that 72 members of Congress had fallen out of compliance with the STOCK Act by making trading disclosures late, inaccurately or under no circumstances.
In a rare insider-trading prosecution of a member of Congress, Representative Chris Collins, Republican of Latest York, resigned in 2019 after pleading guilty to charges related to giving his son insider details about a failed drug trial at an Australian biotech company on whose board the lawmaker served. He served time in prison before being pardoned by President Donald J. Trump.
A Morning Seek the advice of poll in January showed that nearly two-thirds of respondents would really like to see a ban on members of Congress trading.
Within the absence of restrictions, Mr. Pelosi’s transactions alone have spawned a cottage industry of social media accounts and trade-tracking services to assist investors emulate his market moves — often accompanied by scathing commentary about his wife’s potential conflicts of interest.
“The speaker doesn’t own any stocks,” a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi said, adding that she “has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions.”
Those critiques are fueled by the indisputable fact that as speaker, Ms. Pelosi has immense power over which laws makes it to the House floor — including various proposals now being considered to tighten the foundations for financial trading by her husband, her colleagues and their families.
After initially opposing stricter measures, Ms. Pelosi said in February she would support them but wanted federal judges to be held to similar rules. The Wall Street Journal reported last fall that greater than 130 federal judges had overseen cases involving corporations by which they or their families owned interests.
A bill passed by Congress this yr evened out disclosure requirements between the 2 branches of presidency. It was signed into law by Mr. Biden in May.
A legislative proposal now under development by the House’s Democratic leadership, which was outlined in a memo reviewed by The Times, would prohibit lawmakers, their spouses and dependent children from trading stocks, bonds, cryptocurrencies and other financial assets tied to specific corporations. Under that proposal — which is separate from the bill that Mr. Roy, the Texas Republican, is supporting — members and their immediate families could be obliged to either dump those holdings or place them in a blind trust.
Ms. Pelosi supports the proposed framework, in keeping with a senior House official.
Within the Senate, Chuck Schumer of Latest York, the bulk leader, has voiced support for brand spanking new measures to curb trading by members, but no bill that would receive the crucial 60 votes for passage has yet emerged.
The House member designated by Ms. Pelosi to generate a compromise bill to handle the problem — Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California — was herself among the many 97 members identified by The Times’s evaluation.
Zoe Lofgren
Representative, D-Calif.
Reported trades in 127 corporations;
9 potential conflicts
Judiciary Committee
PfizerGilead Sciences*MerckAbbVie*Johnson & JohnsonWalgreens Boots Alliance*
*
Bond trades
Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Mental Property and the Web
Qualcomm
Science, Space and Technology Committee
Applied MaterialsIntel
Note: Stock purchases and sales were made in accounts owned by Ms. Lofgren’s husband.
Ms. Lofgren ranked twenty fifth amongst members of Congress for the variety of transactions disclosed, consequently of trades made by her husband. Amongst those were stocks or bonds issued by five drug manufacturers between 2019 and 2021, a period when the House Judiciary Committee, of which Ms. Lofgren has long been a member, introduced multiple bills to lower the price of pharmaceuticals and root out what it called anticompetitive practices within the pharmaceutical industry. (Many of the bills never received a vote, although elements of 1 proposal were wrapped right into a broader spending bill late in 2019.)
Ms. Lofgren said during an April hearing on the best way to curb congressional stock trading that her husband’s stocks were managed by “some guy on the bank” without the couple’s knowledge. Her office declined to comment on the specifics of the pharmaceutical sales.
“I even have never personally purchased or sold any stock,” Ms. Lofgren said in an announcement. She added that she and her husband had instructed their broker to avoid fossil fuels, tobacco and gambling corporations.
Erin Schaff/The Latest York Times
Six members of Congress said that subsequent to creating transactions that were flagged by the Times evaluation, they or their relations sold all their individual stock investments and stopped buying recent ones. One other five members said that they’re placing or have placed assets in a blind trust.
One lawmaker, Representative Angie Craig, Democrat of Minnesota, said her son had begun buying and selling a spread of stocks without her knowledge while he was at school — much to her chagrin.
A number of members said there was nothing flawed with their investing in individual corporations.
“I’ve had bank stocks and I’ve been strongly against the banks, they usually’ve never supported me, and I’ve got drug stocks and I’ve never supported Big Pharma, they usually’ve not supported me, and it’s just irrelevant to me,” said Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, who added that he had bought a few of the stocks a long time ago and believed he had not purchased a recent share in no less than 10 years.
Mr. Cohen said he had deliberately sold Boeing shares only after its price had fallen while it was under investigation for the 737 Max crashes by the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, of which he’s a member, to avoid potential criticism.
In another professions, the foundations are much stricter. Corporate law practices, private equity firms, news organizations and hedge funds restrict the trading of securities that could possibly be affected by knowledge gleaned on the job — even in cases where the employer’s interactions with those corporations are far faraway from the worker who desires to trade. (The Times doesn’t allow employees to carry stock or another financial interest in an organization or enterprise whose coverage the worker recurrently provides or oversees.)
Trading prohibitions are much more stringent within the White House, where officials and staff members must dump individual stock holdings, recuse themselves from matters that would affect their financial interests or, in rare cases, seek a presidential waiver.
“Each day we now have access to information that folks share with us because we’re members of Congress,” said Representative Abigail Spanberger, Democrat of Virginia, whose bill to tighten trading restrictions has attracted 67 co-sponsors from each parties, including Mr. Roy. That information, she said, “can drive markets.”
“And so the entire purpose of this laws is to say, we now have the power, through this one extra step, to inform the American those who we’re trustworthy,” Ms. Spanberger added.
Greg Kahn for The Latest York Times
Greg Kahn for The Latest York Times
Widespread Conflicts
Through the three-year period analyzed by The Times, a few third of members of Congress — when all seats are filled there are 535 voting members — bought or sold stocks or other financial assets.
The 97 members who were flagged by the Times evaluation amounted to greater than half of the individuals who reported trades, and nearly a fifth of Congress. The group was split almost equally between Democrats and Republicans.
Some committees had multiple members with potential conflicts.
Three members of the House Committee on Financial Services bought or sold Wells Fargo shares during a yr by which the committee was investigating the bank’s consumer practices and risk management.
One in all them, Representative John W. Rose, Republican of Tennessee, sold between $100,000 and $250,000 value of the stock late in 2019, a couple of months before the committee issued a sharply critical report on the corporate that coincided with a steep decline within the bank’s share price amid pandemic fears. A spokesman for Mr. Rose didn’t reply to requests for comment.
John W. Rose
Representative, R-Tenn.
Reported trades in 7 corporations;
3 potential conflicts
Financial Services Committee
Bank of AmericaPinnacle Financial PartnersWells Fargo
1 / 4 of the members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources reported purchases or sales of securities in energy corporations like Exxon and Chevron.
Greater than a 3rd of the members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works reported either buying or selling stocks just like the oil-field services company Schlumberger, the chemical company DuPont or the manufacturer Illinois Tool Works.
Within the House, eight members of the Armed Services Committee reported transactions in defense or aerospace stocks.
Some members reported trades specifically corporations again and again.
Dr. Deborah Malumed, the wife of Mr. Lowenthal, the California Democrat, bought or sold Sunrun — which installs solar energy systems in homes — on 97 occasions during a yearlong period, in keeping with his disclosure statements. During that point, Sunrun shares experienced two rallies — one which began late in 2019 and prolonged into early 2020, and a second, much greater one after a marketwide rout brought on by the outbreak of the coronavirus in the US in March.
Alan Lowenthal
Representative, D-Calif.
Reported trades in 109 corporations;
9 potential conflicts
Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources
SunrunVivint SolarSempra EnergyVistraNextera EnergyBrookfield Infrastructure
Transportation Committee
UberBoeingGeneral Motors
Note: The overwhelming majority of stock purchases and sales were produced from accounts owned by Mr. Lowenthal’s wife.
In 2020, Mr. Lowenthal, a member of the House Committee on Natural Resources and the chairman of an energy-related subcommittee, was a part of a bipartisan group that pushed for the inclusion of renewable energy corporations in pandemic relief measures. (Most of the proposals eventually passed last month as a part of the Inflation Reduction Act.) In June 2020, he co-sponsored a bill to offer tax incentives for using renewable energy. It never received a vote.
Sunrun shares began rallying around that point; by October that they had reached what on the time was an organization high of $80. They cost $9 when Dr. Malumed bought shares earlier that yr, in March — the month she sold Boeing shares ahead of the Transportation Committee’s preliminary report on the 737 Max jet crashes.
Mr. Lowenthal said in an emailed statement that the “overwhelming majority” of his trades and people of his wife — including the Sunrun and Boeing trades — were made by their stockbroker and without his involvement.
“I even have never discussed any congressional matter, including the Boeing 737 Max investigation, with our broker and would never achieve this,” he said.
Other members traded more broadly inside sectors affected by their committees. Mr. Tuberville, a longtime college football coach who joined the Senate in early 2021, quickly established himself as an lively trader with recurring potential conflicts.
Stefani Reynolds for The Latest York Times
As a member of the Senate health committee, he bought and sold shares of major pharmaceutical and medical services corporations.
As a member of the Armed Services Committee, on two occasions he and his wife bought, after which in a 3rd transaction sold, options called puts — which represent the appropriate to sell shares at a specified future price — tied to Microsoft in a five-month period. The second put sale occurred lower than two weeks before the software company lost a $10 billion contract with the Defense Department. And as a member of the agriculture committee and its subcommittee on commodities, risk management and trade, Mr. Tuberville bet on the long run prices of farm products.
Toward the tip of 2021, Mr. Tuberville made a flurry of contract purchases tied to future prices of corn and cattle. He continued buying and selling corn and cattle contracts this yr, whilst the agriculture committee discussed two bills that would affect cattle prices if passed.
Tommy Tuberville
Senator, R-Ala.
Reported trades in 101 corporations or commodities;
20 potential conflicts
Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee
Cattle futuresCorn futuresRed wheat futuresHershey Co.
Armed Services Committee
AlphabetGeneral DynamicsGeneral ElectricHoneywell
Armed Services Committee
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee
Microsoft
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee
ChemedJohnson & JohnsonQuest DiagnosticsAlign TechnologyBecton, Dickinson and CompanyBristol Myers SquibbEdwards LifesciencesMerckRegeneron PharmaceuticalsResMedVeeva Systems
In a transient interview on the Capitol recently, Mr. Tuberville said, “I don’t trade stocks, my brokers do.” He said that he didn’t receive nonpublic information on the agriculture committee and would never share committee information together with his brokers in any case.
“I don’t limit them to anything, what they’ll do, what they’ll’t do,” he said. “I give them money, say to them: ‘I’m in public service now; you do it. Don’t lose all of it!’”
Lately, some lawmakers or their families have bought or sold stocks that were prone to be affected by events that they had been briefed on confidentially.
Representative Mike Kelly, Republican of Pennsylvania, fell under scrutiny by the Office of Congressional Ethics over a stock trade.
In 2020, Mr. Kelly’s wife, Victoria Kelly, bought $15,000 to $50,000 of stock within the mining company Cleveland-Cliffs — just in the future after Mr. Kelly’s office learned that the Commerce Department would initiate a tariff investigation that may profit the corporate, which on the time employed about 1,400 staff at a steel plant in Butler, inside his congressional district. Mr. Kelly had lobbied Trump administration officials for extra tariff protections, in keeping with an ethics office report.
Ms. Kelly’s purchase — made before the news was public — was the one trade she made in a person stock that yr; records suggest she took an almost 300 percent profit when she sold eight months later.
The ethics office’s investigation was disclosed last yr. While Ms. Kelly’s Cleveland-Cliffs purchase was not flagged by the Times evaluation since it didn’t overlap in an obvious way together with her husband’s committee assignments, 23 other transactions made by her in 2019 were purchases and sales of quite a lot of pharmaceutical, insurance and medical equipment stocks while Mr. Kelly was a member of the health care subcommittee of the House Committee on Ways and Means.
Mr. and Ms. Kelly didn’t reply to requests for comment, and it’s unclear whether the House Committee on Ethics — to which the Office of Congressional Ethics, a separate and independent body, referred the matter last July — remains to be investigating.
But even ethics committee members in each chambers, who’re accountable for ensuring compliance with the STOCK Act disclosure requirements, have potential stock-trading conflicts.
Representative Dean Phillips, Democrat of Minnesota and a member of the House Ethics Committee who also served on the Financial Services Committee, traded greater than 150 times in tech corporations, banks and other financial institutions.
Dean Phillips
Representative, D-Minn.
Reported trades in 276 corporations;
34 potential conflicts
Financial Services Committee
Charles SchwabWells FargoBank of Latest York MellonNorthern TrustGoldman SachsJPMorgan ChaseTruist FinancialE-TradeMetaBank of AmericaCitigroupResidents FinancialFifth Third BancorpFranklin ResourcesHuntington BancsharesPNC Financial ServicesState StreetComericaFirst Residents BancsharesInvescoMorgan StanleyAffiliated Managers GroupM&T Bank Corp.PayPalU.S. BancorpCIT Group*CME GroupKeyCorpPeople’s United FinancialRegions Financial Corp.*SVB FinancialSynovus*Wintrust FinancialZions Bancorporation
*
Bond trade
A spokesman for Mr. Phillips said that he “didn’t direct the sale or purchase of any stocks after being elected” in 2018 “to avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest together with his official duties in Congress.” A number of the transactions occurred after January 2020, when the representative said Mr. Phillips began moving most of his stocks right into a blind trust, a process that took 18 months.
Representative John Rutherford, Republican of Florida, traded aerospace and defense corporations during his time on the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Homeland Security. His office didn’t reply to requests for comment.
John Rutherford
Representative, R-Fla.
Reported trades in 60 corporations;
3 potential conflicts
Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security
BAE SystemsMicrosoftLockheed Martin
Mr. Rutherford seemed to be late in reporting greater than 150 trades, in keeping with an evaluation by the Office of Congressional Ethics, which valued the trades involved at between $652,000 and $3.5 million.
In February, the matter was referred to the House Ethics Committee, of which he’s a member.
In August, the committee said it had dismissed the matter.
Kate Kelly covers money, influence, and policy as a correspondent within the Washington bureau of The Times. Before that, she spent 20 years covering Wall Street deals, key players and their intersection with politics. She is the creator of three books, including “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh.” @katekelly
Adam Playford is projects editor for The Upshot, where he works on investigative data projects. He previously worked as an investigative editor on the Tampa Bay Times and a reporter at Newsday and the Palm Beach Post. @adamplayford
Alicia Parlapiano is a graphics editor and reporter covering politics and policy from Washington. She joined The Times in 2011 and previously worked at The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center. @aliciaparlap
Ege Uz is a creative technologist and the 2022 Digital News Design Fellow at The Times.
In regards to the evaluation
The Times began with data on financial transactions by members of Congress or their immediate relations between 2019 and 2021. The information was drawn from filings by the senators and representatives, which were digitized and connected to data on the businesses’ industries by Capitol Trades, a project of the Frankfurt-based financial data company 2iQ Research. The information was compiled by the corporate’s team of greater than 100 analysts, who reviewed each filing by hand, in keeping with Ahmed Asaad, head of research at Capitol Trades, and Diona Denkovska, 2iQ Research’s head of information strategy.
Times reporters built a database of greater than 9,000 examples of how those corporations intersected with specific congressional committees and subcommittees. They identified committees that oversee areas of federal policy vital to the businesses’ business, and people who oversee or fund federal agencies that gave the businesses significant contracts. Additionally they checked out investigations that committees have performed into specific corporations and the corporate leaders whom those committees called to testify in hearings.
They matched those potential conflicts with data on committee assignments, provided by the ProPublica Congress API, Congressional Quarterly and Charles Stewart III, a professor at M.I.T., to search out examples of trades that overlapped with the member’s committee tenure.
The Times didn’t include trades in municipal bonds, mutual funds or index funds, even people who track a selected sector. It also didn’t consider trades by members who hurried to divest from shares shortly after being appointed to a relevant committee or those whose transactions were all sales, so long as they were entirely divesting themselves of stocks inside a 60-day period.
The Times couldn’t account for each committee that affects each company; consequently, the evaluation is unquestionably an undercount.