‘Culture of corruption’: Two more Republican congressmen break financial disclosure law

Two Republican members of Congress violated a decade-old financial disclosure and conflicts-of-interest law by reporting personal financial transactions months late, according to federal financial documents reviewed by Raw Story.

Both Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA) and Rep. Ron Estes (R-KS) violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act when they were up to four months late disclosing several personal stock transactions valued at between $1,001 and $15,000 each.

The STOCK Act requires key government officials, including members of Congress, to publicly report within 45 days most purchases, sales and exchanges of stocks, bonds, commodity futures, securities and cryptocurrencies.

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Wittman’s Sept. 30 disclosure reported 10 stock transactions, nine of which were past the 45-day deadline. The late transactions totaled up to $135,000 and were investments in various companies including semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom, capital markets company S&P Global and transportation company Union Pacific, to name a few.

The transactions were reported between two weeks and nearly four months late.

Neither Estes's nor Wittman's congressional office responded to Raw Story’s request for comment.

This is the second time in recent weeks that Wittman violated the STOCK Act, Raw Story reported. He reported four late transactions totaling between $4,004 and $60,000 on an Aug. 13 federal financial disclosure document, including the sale of Piedmont Office Realty Trust stock and purchases of stock in Accenture, Mastercard and TJX Companies.

Estes reported three April purchases of up to $45,000 in U.S. Treasury savings bonds on his Sept. 30 financial disclosure, about four months past the 45-day deadline.

Estes serves on the Committee on Ways and Means, Budget Committee, Education and the Workforce Committee and Joint Economic Committee. The Committee on Ways and Means oversees the country’s bonded debt.

The standard fine for violating the STOCK Act is $200. But the House Committee on Ethics and Senate Select Committee on Ethics have historically waived the fees for many violators, and the committees refuse to publicly release information on who it has fined or the amount of the fines it does issue.

“The biggest weakness of the STOCK Act is it’s just a minor $200 fine for a late filing, and that's not enough to make members of Congress worry about the law,” said Craig Holman, a Capitol Hill lobbyist on ethics and campaign finance rules for nonprofit Public Citizen. “Most members of Congress are millionaires, and so a $200 fine is really not a big deal to them.”

When a member of Congress is in a position to oversee an area that affects a particular investment, that’s a “serious conflict of interest,” Holman said.

“That's the whole point of having this transparency, so we can see if there are conflicts of interests and then start weighing in on whether that conflict of interest is influencing our actual public policies,” Holman said. “That's why transparency is so critical. If we don't have transparency, we're not going to know any of these conflicts of interest, whether a member of Congress or an executive branch official should recuse themselves from official duties.”

Holman added that there should be an overall ban on congressional stock trading, particularly supporting the Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks (ETHICS) Act.

“The trust between the public and their elected officials is sacred – and these two members are actively eroding that trust,” said Rahna Epting, executive director for progressive public policy advocacy group and PAC, MoveOn, in a statement. “There is no debating it: Americans have a right to know that their elected representatives aren’t taking advantage of their power to pad their own pockets. These lawmakers owe their constituents, and fellow lawmakers, an explanation as to why they’re fueling a culture of corruption in Congress.”

Epidemic of violations

Dozens of members of Congress have failed to comply with the STOCK Act in recent years.

During the 117th Congress from 2021 to 2022, at least 78 members of Congress — Democrats and Republicans alike — were found to have violated the STOCK Act's disclosure provisions, according to a tally maintained by Insider.

Raw Story has this year identified 26 members of the 118th Congress who have broken the federal conflicts of interest law, including the new addition of Estes.

In recent weeks, repeat violators have broken the federal disclosure law again.

Rep. Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) recently violated the STOCK Act for the third time in 14 months. Rep. Kathy Manning (D-NC) recently became a two-time offender, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) was several months late disclosing a family stock sale — again.

The ongoing violations come at a time when a bipartisan group of lawmakers have introduced several similar bills aimed at banning congressional stock trading.

The most recent legislation introduced is the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act, introduced by Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) in September, which would require members of Congress and their family members to divest from their stocks or place them in a blind trust.

“Members of Congress should not be playing the stock market while we make federal policy and have extraordinary access to confidential information,” Ossoff said in a press release. “Stock trading by members of Congress massively erodes public confidence in Congress with serious appearance of impropriety, which is why we should ban stock trading by members of Congress altogether.”

The Ban Stock Trading for Government Officials Act was introduced in July, which would prohibit members of Congress, the president, the vice president, senior executive branch officials, their spouses and children from trading stocks and would require greater transparency with financial disclosures, The Hill reported.

Another two-party bill, the Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act was introduced in May and is co-sponsored in part by political rivals in Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL).

Other materially similar bills include the ETHICS Act, the TRUST in Congress Act and the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments (PELOSI) Act. In the decade since the STOCK Act’s passage, the push for a total ban on lawmakers trading stocks while in office gained but then lost momentum last year when the Democratic-led House, then led by Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, decided not to conduct a hearing on any of the stock-ban bills and never brought it to the House floor for a vote.

News organizations including the New York Times, Insider, NPR and Sludge have documented rampant financial conflicts of interests among dozens of members of Congress, such as those who bought and sold defense contractor stock while occupying positions on congressional armed services committees or otherwise voting on measures to send such companies billions of federal dollars. The executive and judicial branches are riddled with similar financial conflict issues, too, as the Wall Street Journal hasreported.

The Wall Street Journal won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize for its investigation into financial conflicts among officials who work in federal agencies while Insider won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sunshine Award for its reporting on congressional financial conflicts.

This week, Raw Story won first prize in the 2023 ION Awards contest for its series of exclusive reports about members of Congress violating the STOCK Act.