Busted: Dem lawmaker with military oversight is playing the market with a military supplier

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Rep. Bill Keating (D-MA) is the latest member of a congressional armed services committee to personally invest in one of the nation’s top defense contractors while also overseeing the nation’s military affairs.

Keating disclosed purchasing between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of Boeing Co. corporate notes, according to a U.S. House financial document filed Sept. 28 and reviewed by Raw Story.

Keating is a member of the House Armed Services Committee which, in the U.S. House, “retains exclusive jurisdiction for defense policy generally, ongoing military operations, the organization and reform of the Department of Defense” and other military-focused responsibilities.

The Boeing purchase is “part of an IRA retirement account that is third-party managed, and investment decisions are made by that third party,” Keating spokesperson Chris Matthews told Raw Story in an email. “The positions of the investment firm do not influence the congressman's policy positions.”

Keating’s office declined to name who makes trades on the congressman’s behalf.

“Unfortunately, we've been advised not to disclose non-public information about the Congressman's personal accounts due to concerns surrounding cyber-security targeting,” Matthews said.

Matthews noted that Keating “does support a ban on member trading” and is a co-sponsor of the TRUST in Congress Act, a bipartisan bill — languishing in the House Committee on House Administration since January — that would notably prohibit members of Congress and their immediate family members from buying and selling stock.

That doesn’t cut it for Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who described Keating’s investment as a “raging conflict of interest.”

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Undermining the integrity of Congress:’ Four more GOP lawmakers just violated a federal law

Tillipman noted that regardless of whether Keating personally made the trade, he’s attested to being aware that he owns a financial interest in a defense contractor. And as a member of the House Armed Services Committee, he has the power to influence legislation, conduct oversight and set spending priorities that affect Boeing — and therefore, his personal investments, she said.

“It’s crazy,” Tillipman told Raw Story. “You have a body that doesn’t want to self-regulate. They need to do better.”

Keating is hardly the only member of Congress to invest in defense contractors.

RELATED ARTICLE: GOP lawmaker breaks financial law after ripping opponent for breaking financial law

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), for one, recently purchased up to $250,000 worth of stock in telecommunications technology company Qualcomm Inc., a federal defense contractor, while serving on the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services and actively blocking hundreds of military nominations and promotions, congressional financial disclosures reviewed by Raw Story indicate.

Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott (R-SC) failed to properly disclose nearly a dozen stocks on his 2022 financial disclosure, Roll Call reported. That included up to $50,000 in Boeing Co. stock, according to a review of federal financial disclosures by Raw Story.

Raw Story also broke the news that Rep. Rick Allen (R-GA) was as much as six-and-a-half years late in reporting 136 stock and other financial transactions on an Aug. 10 disclosure — totaling between $3.05 million and $8.56 million. Up to $15,000 of that was invested in defense contractor CAE Inc.

While Keating publicly disclosed his Boeing investment within a 45-day window mandated by law, numerous members of Congress have violated the existing Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 by failing to properly disclose otherwise legal stock and financial trades.

Keating himself violated the STOCK Act in 2022 with late trades, according to Insider.


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Jeanine Pirro hangs J6ers out to dry in bid to lock in their guilty pleas

A group calling itself "J6ers Were Destroyed by Weaponization" is asking a federal court to force Attorney General Todd Blanche to review and potentially throw out guilty pleas from January 6 defendants — and prosecutors in Jeanine Pirro's U.S. Attorney's office say the entire lawsuit should be tossed out.

The Trump administration has broadly tried to wipe the slate clean for the January 6 rioters, with the president granting them a mass pardon on his first day, and even toying with giving them payouts in a $1.8 billion slush fund — but they may have found one demand for January 6 handouts that goes too far.

The petitioner describes itself only as an unincorporated association of unnamed individuals prosecuted over the Capitol riot, arguing that charging decisions, pretrial detention, and sentencing threats coerced many of them into pleading guilty. The group wants a judge to order Blanche to review every plea tied to two specific federal charges, initiate motions to vacate or withdraw from those pleas, and launch investigations into the prosecutors and government informants involved in the original cases.

Prosecutors representing Blanche argue the request asks the court to do something it simply has no power to do.

"Mandamus cannot be used to control the Attorney General's discretionary law enforcement and litigation decisions," the government's filing states, citing decades of precedent establishing that courts can't force prosecutors to investigate, charge, or reverse course on cases already resolved.

The filing also picks apart the group's legal standing, noting the petition never identifies who its members actually are, how many exist, or how the organization is run, undercutting its claim to sue on their behalf. Even if the court ordered DOJ to conduct the requested reviews and investigations, prosecutors argue, that alone wouldn't erase any defendant's existing guilty plea, since only the judges who originally accepted those pleas have authority to disturb them.

The government further argues the lawsuit's request for a blanket declaration that certain categories of January 6 plea deals are "constitutionally infirm" amounts to exactly the kind of abstract advisory opinion federal courts are barred from issuing, since it wouldn't bind any of the judges who actually presided over those cases.

Blanche's office is asking the court to dismiss the case in its entirety, arguing the group failed to establish that it — or any of its unnamed members — has legal standing to bring the claims at all.

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Lauren Boebert accused of sex with three staffers in complaint alleging $200K hush payment

An explosive sworn complaint filed with the House Ethics Committee alleges Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) carried on a sexual relationship with her district director in the office, in a car and in campaign-paid hotel rooms — and that roughly $200,000 changed hands when the staffer threatened to go to the committee.

The complaint says that after Clarice Navarro Ratzlaff left the office and told Boebert she intended to file an ethics complaint, a payment of about $200,000 followed in March 2025. Its author says he does not know where the money came from, and the passage describing how he verified the payment is redacted in the published version.

Navarro Ratzlaff is a former Colorado lawmaker who served as a U.S. Department of Agriculture official during the first Trump administration. She ran Boebert's district operation for four years.

The complaint was executed Sept. 17 by David B. Wheeler, president and co-founder of American Muckrakers, a political action committee that has targeted Boebert for years. He published it himself.

House Rule XXIII, clause 18(a) bars members from sexual relationships with any House employee under their supervision, with an exception only for spouses. Consent is not a defense, as the rule places the obligation on the member. The House adopted it in February 2018 after harassment scandals swept Capitol Hill, and the Ethics Committee cited the same provision in opening its 2019 investigation into then-Rep. Katie Hill.

The complaint alleges the relationship with Navarro Ratzlaff ran from 2021 through January 2025 while she worked under Boebert's supervision, with encounters during and after office hours, in the district office, in a vehicle for which she collected mileage reimbursements, and in hotel rooms paid for by Boebert's campaign committee. It makes similar allegations about two other aides.

The evidence for the relationships rests on unnamed sources described in notes not included in the published filing. For one of the other aides, the complaint also cites public photographs; that exhibit is a Google Images printout of Instagram posts, several of them birthday tributes from a staffer to her boss.

The filing's own analysis of House payroll data puts Navarro Ratzlaff's total compensation at about $450,000 over four years and identifies roughly $31,000 in what it calls implied year-end bonuses, calculated by comparing fourth-quarter pay against each year's third-quarter baseline. The complaint alleges those payments were made on account of the relationship rather than for work performed. Wheeler's own exhibit qualifies that, noting the fourth-quarter increases "are consistent with year-end bonuses, a routine and lawful House practice; a mid-quarter raise or retroactive adjustment could produce a similar pattern. Source records should be independently verified before publication."

Raw Story has not independently verified the payroll or campaign finance figures in the complaint.

Boebert has demanded transparency about payments members make to silence staffers.

Signing the Epstein files discharge petition last year, she told Raw Story that congressional settlements should be disclosed too, adding that she did not care "what letter is next to anybody's name." She asked why members who made such payments were still serving.

"What were they covering up? What were they paying off?" Boebert asked at the time.

Those settlements came from a congressional fund that has paid out more than $17 million since the late 1990s. The payment Wheeler alleges is not one of them.

Boebert's office and her campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Ethics Committee does not confirm or deny the existence of reviews.

Boebert's ex-husband rejected the allegations when Wheeler contacted him shortly before publication.

"I think it is all a fairy tale made up propaganda," Jayson Boebert said in a message Wheeler published. "I don't believe any of that. Bad sources."

Trump slapped with second suit to bar armed 'intimidation' tactic at midterm polls

A coalition of civil rights groups and union organizations Friday sued the Trump administration to prevent the deployment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling locations during November’s midterm elections.

The suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is the second this month, following comments from top Trump officials citing a federal policy to allow ICE officers to enter polling locations in certain circumstances to conduct immigration enforcement.

The groups argue the policy violates the federal law that prohibits “armed men” at election sites, and also causes voter intimidation, which is barred under the Voting Rights Act.

Under federal law, “troops” or “armed men” are allowed at polling locations only if “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” And the section of the Voting Rights Act the groups cite prohibits “intimidation,” “threats,” or “coercion” against a person for voting or attempting to vote.

“The result is predictable: voters across the country—particularly Black, Latino, and Asian voters, naturalized citizens, and members of mixed-status families—are afraid to vote, help others vote, and participate in civic life,” according to the suit.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin earlier this month noted that agents could conduct immigration enforcement at polling places. And before U.S. senators this week, FBI Director Kash Patel did not rule out sending FBI agents to polling locations, but said officers would “follow the law.”

The Department of Justice dismissed the idea that officers would be sent to polling locations.

“The DOJ has never said it would send federal law enforcement to polling locations,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement to States Newsroom. “Any suggestion otherwise is fearmongering.”

In a statement to States Newsroom, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said those “who are here legally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear.”

“Allegations that DHS law enforcement engages in ‘racial profiling’ are disgusting, reckless, and categorically FALSE,” the spokesperson said. “What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S.—NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity.”

The DHS spokesperson added that ICE was not planning any operations that targeted polling locations.

NAACP among groups suing

“We reject this administration’s attempt to desecrate our polling sites by converting them into militarized zones through the unlawful deployment of ICE or any other federal agent,” Kristen Clarke, the NAACP’s general counsel, said in a statement.

NAACP is one of nine groups that filed suit. The rest are Mi Familia en Accion, Asian Pacific American Advocates, the National Urban League, Minnesota 8, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, the International Union of Painters and the United Food and Commercial Workers International.

“Turning the fundamental right of exercising our vote into a high-stakes encounter with the militarized strong arm of the current administration isn’t protection and it isn’t oversight; it’s disenfranchisement, period,” Clarke said. “The NAACP calls on the court to reject this blatant attempt by federal officials to obstruct our elections through tactics pulled straight from the Jim Crow playbook.”

The nine groups are represented by the Legal Defense Fund, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the National Immigration Law Center, Protect Democracy and the Democracy Defenders Fund.

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.

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