‘I mistakenly left it in draft’: Republican violates STOCK Act with up to $5 million in late disclosures

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) is the latest federal lawmaker to violate the STOCK Act by failing to properly disclose purchasing up to $5 million in U.S. Treasury notes, according to a Raw Story analysis of congressional financial disclosures.

On May 4, Bishop disclosed that he purchased between $1,000,001 to $5 million worth of Treasury notes on Dec. 12 — more than three months past a federal deadline.

The disclosure said, “The submittal of this report is late because I mistakenly left it in draft and failed to submit when originally posted in Dec. 2022.”

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Anti-corruption’ Rep. Dan Goldman made hundreds of stock trades after saying he'd create a ‘blind trust’

Bishop’s team confirmed this in a statement. “When submitting PTRs in December for U.S. Treasury securities purchased, Congressman Bishop mistakenly omitted to press ‘submit’ for the last of the three filings. He submitted it immediately upon discovering the mistake, and regrets the error,” said Allie McCandless, a spokesperson for Bishop.

Bishop’s team did not indicate if he would be required to pay a federal fine — the standard penalty for a late financial disclosure of this sort is $200.

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) is the latest member of Congress to violate the disclosure provisions of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act requires lawmakers to publicly reveal, within 45 days, most individual stock, bond, Treasury security and cryptocurrency transactions. The law, passed by Congress in 2012, is designed to prevent insider trading, promote transparency and reduce conflicts of interest among federal lawmakers and other government officials.

Members of Congress are only required to disclose the values of such trades in broad ranges.

‘Continued, ongoing violation’

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, senior government affairs manager with the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group that exposes conflicts of interest in the government, expressed skepticism that there would be any consequences for the violation.

A $200 fine “is not going to disincentivize or dissuade anyone from doing anything, particularly if you're talking about transactions in the millions of dollars. They're not going to care about a $200 fine, and even with that, oftentimes the ethics committee chooses to waive the $200 fine,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “If there are no penalties and no consequences, then I think you’re going to see continued, ongoing violations and noncompliance with these disclosure requirements.”

Bishop is hardly the first congressman that Raw Story has reported on violating the STOCK Act.

In January, Raw Story broke the news that Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) failed to properly disclose that his wife sold up to $100,000 worth of stock in gaming company Activision Blizzard in September 2022 and purchased up to $15,000 worth of stock in Amazon.com in August 2022.

Related article: As First Republic Bank faltered, five members of Congress dumped their personal stock investments

Raw Story also reported that Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) was several days late disclosing that he had sold personal stock in an energy company and a pair of federal defense contractors.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) also violated the STOCK Act in March with a late disclosure.

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

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 this week won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigation into financial conflicts among officials who work in federal agencies.

Potential stock-trade ban?

Amid these problems, a growing, bipartisan and decidedly odd coalition of federal lawmakers want to ban themselves and their colleagues from trading stocks altogether.

The most recent bill to be introduced — the Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act — 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 Act, the Trust in Congress Act and the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act.

Some lawmakers pushed for a congressional stock ban in 2022 only to be thwarted by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic congressional leaders, who wouldn’t allow a vote on introduced legislation.

As for Bishop, the congressman “broke the law by not reporting these transactions within that timeframe that he’s supposed to, so that should be the most important thing here,” Hedtler-Gaudette said.

RELATED ARTICLE: Raw Story goes one-on-one with Spanberger about Pelosi, McCarthy and her quest to ban congressional stock trading

“We’ve seen a lot of these kinds of violations in the STOCK Act disclosure requirements over the past couple of years, and I think it just speaks to a larger issue that really pervades the institution of Congress, and that’s that they just don't really take their ethics very seriously,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “In particular, they don't take their disclosure requirements and their transaction reporting requirements seriously, and that's a problem because already the public doesn't trust Congress, generally speaking.”

POGO said its ideal vision for policies around congressional stock trading would be a ban on trading stocks and other assets like commodities and futures that are susceptible to insider trading while in office.

“It’s not that we don't want people to be able to have a financial portfolio, and obviously everyone ought to be able to save as far as retirement goes, but they just shouldn't be able to have an unfair advantage,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. “In the current moment, that’s what they have right now.”

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Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor condemned her conservative colleagues for allowing the Donald Trump administration to continue making immigration stops based on racial profiling.

In a brief, unsigned order issued Monday, the high court lifted a federal judge's order that had prohibited federal agents from making indiscriminate immigration stops in the Los Angeles area. Sotomayor turned in a searing dissent that laid out the plainly racist intentions of Trump's immigration enforcement.

"We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job," she wrote. "Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent."

Sotomayor took issue with Justice Brett Kavanaugh's reasoning, made in his brief concurrence, and said his arguments ignored reality.

"It is the people of Los Angeles and the Central District who will suffer from this Court’s grant of relief to the Government," she wrote. "Immigration agents are not conducting 'brief stops for questioning,' as the concurrence would like to believe. They are seizing people using firearms, physical violence, and warehouse detentions."

"Nor are undocumented immigrants the only ones harmed by the Government’s conduct," Sotomayor added. "United States citizens are also being seized, taken from their jobs, and prevented from working to support themselves and their families. The concurrence relegates the interests of U. S. citizens and individuals with legal status to a single sentence, positing that the Government will free these individuals as soon as they show they are legally in the United States. That blinks reality. Two plaintiffs in this very case tried to explain that they are U. S. citizens; one was then pushed against a fence with his arms twisted behind his back, and the other was taken away from his job to a warehouse for further questioning."

The justice noted that Kavanaugh's reasoning seemed to shift the administrative burden from the government to individuals.

"It is the Government’s burden to prove that it has reasonable suspicion to stop someone," she wrote. "The concurrence improperly shifts the burden onto an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely. The Constitution does not permit the creation of such a second-class citizenship status. The equities therefore lie with the plaintiffs. Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor. Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities."

Sotomayor then assailed the right-wing majority's growing reliance on emergency applications to rule in Trump's favor.

"The Court’s order is troubling for another reason: It is entirely unexplained," she wrote. "In the last eight months, this Court’s appetite to circumvent the ordinary appellate process and weigh in on important issues has grown exponentially ... There may be good justification for issuing an unreasoned order in some circumstances. Yet, some situations simply cry out for an explanation, such as when the Government’s conduct flagrantly violates the law, or when lower courts and litigants need guidance about the issues on which they should focus."

The ruling violated a fundamental right laid out in the Bill of Rights, the justice argued.

"The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be 'free from arbitrary interference by law officers,'" Sotomayor wrote. "After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees, I dissent."

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Curb Your Enthusiasm actress and comedian Susie Essman revealed a past encounter with Britain’s Prince Andrew in which the Duke of York made a series of bizarre remarks that left her stunned.

Writing of the encounter in the New York Times’ Air Mail newsletter, Essman — who plays the foul-mouthed Susie Greene in the HBO show — recalled attending a cocktail reception at the royal residence Kensington Palace “several years” ago where she was introduced to Prince Andrew, who she dubbed as the “Fredo” of the British Royal Family — a reference to the less capable brother in the 1972 film “The Godfather.”

“We have a Jew who runs our finances,” Prince Andrew blurted out during the pair's small talk about the event space, Essman said.

‘“Well, isn’t that clever of you,” Essman, who is Jewish, said she told Prince Andrew before immediately turning around and walking away.

In her submission to Air Mail, Essman went on to ponder why Prince Andrew would make such a comment, and from seemingly out of nowhere.

“Did he say it because he knew I was Jewish and thought that was a way to connect with me? You know, the ‘some of my best friends are Black’ syndrome?” Essman wrote. “Or did he say it because he’s a rabid anti-Semite and was putting me in my place? The royal family is German, after all, and Andrew’s uncle Edward was a known Nazi sympathizer.”

“Did he say it because he had no idea that I was Jewish and just assumed everyone in the room was as anti-Semitic as he was?” Essman wrote.

“Or did he say it because he’s just a f---ing idiot who doesn’t know how to read a room, let alone how to turn on a television… So many questions and so few answers. I’ve concluded that I will never understand the royal family, nor will I ever know why the prince chose to tell me a personal detail about who runs ‘our’ finances. I suppose I could have asked him, but I wasn’t enjoying the conversation and chose to end it.”

Prince Andrew has been largely out of the public eye since he faced extensive public scrutiny for his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Following allegations of sexual abuse involving Epstein's victims, the British royal was stripped of his military titles and royal patronages.

President Donald Trump downplayed domestic violence in a Monday speech as part of his White House Religious Liberty Commission — and was hit by swift condemnation.

Not only were onlookers outraged by the president's dismissal of spousal abuse, some also called out Trump's own long history with women. The so-called "Access Hollywood" tape, for example, recorded Trump bragging that he can grab women's genitals without consent.

Trump had been complaining that domestic crimes were being counted in Washington, DC — which, he said, was diminishing the success of him sending in troops to tackle crime.

"If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say, this was a crime, see?" he added. "So now I can't claim 100%."

His comment was made on the same day that an appeals court ruled unanimously against Trump's appeal of a defamation case in which he relentlessly attacked E. Jean Carroll publicly, claiming she was lying when she claimed he sexually assaulted her in a department store.

It also happens while Trump is being criticized for his administration working to conceal the files around the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself after being arrested for sex trafficking and child molestation.

"Just the president Benedict Donald co-signing that your husband beating you or forcing you to have sex against your will is ‘like no biggie,'" wrote actor Rachel True on X.

The Voter Protection Project account on X characterized it, "Donald Trump just said domestic violence shouldn't be a crime." The group noted it was "curious to see how MAGA will try to spin this."

Politico columnist Jonathan Martin expected the upcoming spin would be, "Look, he was on the Old Testament section of the speech."

Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) posted a screen capture of a reporter in which biographer Harry Hurt III said that he acquired Ivana Trump's divorce deposition in which she alleged that Trump raped her."

Republican and Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell called it, "Just a casual dismissal of domestic violence as a crime."

Professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, Justin Wolfers, posted, "Let me say what the President won't: Domestic violence is not okay. It's immoral, illegal and abusive, and no real man is okay would do it, approve of it, or minimize it."

"Utah is one of the worst states in the nation for women's equality. Republicans here will defend against those claims forcefully, but they won't back away from their support of a president that endorses domestic violence. Their claims are hollow," wrote Utah state Sen. Nate Blouin.

Lawyer Mark Ramos called the comment, "Grossly irresponsible. And un-Christian. Yet *that's who he is* - zero change from his entitled, amoral, "grab 'em" bully mindset. If you supported him before for whatever policy or party loyalty or false promises, it's not too late to stop ignoring his vile idiocy. Your choice."

"That 'see' at the end is as evil as the statement because it frames bs as empirical evidence. Smh," said college faculty member Antoine Hardy.

Analyst Julie Roginsky wrote on X, "Of course the man whose wife accused him or rape and tearing out chunks of her hair would say this."

Researcher Will Stancil called on officials to say something. "Every single Democrat should instantly condemn him for this and demand a retraction and apology. They should demand Republicans condemn it too, although they'll be too cowardly to do it. Blow it up. He's supporting domestic violence - it's grotesque and nightmarish," he wrote on X.

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