‘Undermining the integrity of Congress:’ Four more GOP lawmakers just violated a federal law
Four Republican members of Congress have blown past a federal deadline for disclosing personal stock trades, with some more than a year late, a Raw Story analysis of congressional financial documents reveals.
Reps. John Curtis (R-UT), Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Rob Wittman (R-VA) are among the lawmakers who violated the decade-old Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act with tardy financial disclosures.
Together, the four members of Congress’ improperly disclosed trades are worth as much as $555,000 collectively, Raw Story’s analysis indicates.
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.
Passed by Congress in 2012, the STOCK Act is designed to stop insider trading, curb conflicts-of-interest and enhance transparency.
But three of the four late-filers — McMorris Rodgers, Wittman and Malliotakis — waited until this month to publicly report months-old stock transactions, some going back to last year.
None of their congressional offices responded to Raw Story’s requests for comment.
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Wittman reported four late transactions totaling between $4,004 and $60,000 on an Aug. 13 federal financial disclosure. (Members of Congress are only required to report their transactions in broad ranges.)
Wittman’s oldest stock transaction on the report was made on Feb. 27, 2022, with the sale of Piedmont Office Realty Trust stock. Between July 2022 and December 2022, Wittman purchased stock in Accenture, Mastercard and TJX Companies. All transactions were in the $1,001 to $15,000 range.
McMorris Rodgers reported on her Aug. 11 federal disclosure a Dec. 2, 2022, purchase for the Deep Roots Campaign, a community bond in a private K-12 school, valued between $100,001 and $250,000, along with another such bond purchase on May 12, for between $15,001 and $50,000.
Malliotakis reported two stock transactions from Jan. 6, 2022, on her Aug.11 disclosure report — one for the purchase of AT&T stock in the $1,001 to $15,000 range and one for the sale of General Electric stock in the same range.
Curtis just missed the 45-day reporting deadline: he was two days late disclosing 11 stock trades totaling between $11,001 and $165,000, according to an Aug. 7 federal disclosure reviewed by Raw Story.
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“A law firm handles the preparation and filing of all periodic transaction reports for Congressman Curtis,” said Corey Norman, chief of staff to Curtis, in a statement. “The law firm filed the PTR on the business day following the report’s Saturday due date. A late fee is not typically assessed when a report is filed on the next business day and the law firm would address that as the responsible party if a minor fee is assessed.”
Curtis reported stock transactions in a handful of companies, including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Sysco Corporation, T-Mobile, Valero Energy and semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices.
Curtis began the process to “transition his investment portfolio to a qualified blind trust some months ago and expects final House Ethics approval soon,” Norman said in the emailed statement.
In mid-March, Curtis was one of five members of Congress who dumped their personal stock shares in now-defunct First Republic Bank, which at the time was bleeding stock value amid the meltdown of three regional banks, Raw Story reported.
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The National Taxpayers Union, a fiscally conservative taxpayer advocacy group, supports legislation that would require legislators to put their stocks in qualified blind trusts where an independent trustee controls assets without the grantor’s input or knowledge to avoid conflicts of interest.
Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “had talked about how it's a free market and members should be able to openly trade in stocks, but it's not a free information market because members of Congress have access to special reports in advance of them being public,” said Demian Brady, vice president of research for the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. “So, there's lots of concerns there, and, of course, they get to vote and make decisions that could impact the financial state of various companies and industries, so it's good to have that wall of a blind trust where we know that members are not thinking about their stock portfolios when they're making decisions on behalf of taxpayers and citizens.”
“Every violation of the STOCK [Act] big and small lead to reasonable questions about [if] members of Congress are working in their constituents’ interest or to boost their own financial portfolios,” said Donald Sherman, executive vice president and chief counsel for ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, in a statement.
“These conflicts impact members of both parties and every state in the union, undermining the integrity of Congress at a precarious time for our democracy,” he said. “Passing comprehensive reform that bans members and their families from owning and trading individual stocks and similar aspects is essential to restoring public trust and avoiding conflicts in our policymaking.”
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 committee does not release information on who it has fined or the amount of the fines it does issue.
"It's a black hole when it goes to the Ethics Committee, and we don't know if they will assess penalties, or they just don't do anything about it.” said Kedric Payne, vice president, general counsel and senior director of ethics for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government watchdog group.
Tom Rust, staff director and chief counsel for the House Committee on Ethics, which is tasked with investigating alleged STOCK Act violations, said “no comment” when reached by Raw Story.
Epidemic of violations
Dozens of members of Congress have failed to comply with the STOCK Act. 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 23 members of the 118th Congress who have broken the federal conflicts of interest law, including the new additions of Curtis, Malliotakis, McMorris Rodgers and Wittman.
In recent weeks, repeat violators have broken the federal disclosure law again.
This week, Raw Story reported that Rep. Rick Allen (R-GA) was as much as six-and-a-half years late in disclosing 136 stock and other financial transactions — totaling between $3.05 million and $8.56 million. This is at least the third separate time Allen has violated the STOCK Act.
Rep. Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) recently violated the STOCK Act for the third time in 14 months. Rep. Kathy Manning (D-N.C.) 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.
"We see that the STOCK Act is not complied with the way it's intended to be, and if there are no consequences for the late filings, you continue to see that there probably will be less compliance with the law,” Payne said, adding that the Campaign Legal Center supports legislation that would required members of Congress to divest of any stocks in individual companies.
The most recent legislation introduced is the Ban Stock Trading for Government Officials Act, 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 Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks (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 has reported.
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.
Jan 6 Insurrection
Rioters before the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (AFP)
Rep. Rick Allen (R-GA). Source: U.S. House of Representatives