Good day all. Once again, we have a case where a high ranking Progressive Liberal Democrat couldn’t be bothered to follow the laws they shove down everyone else’s throats.
In this case we have a Progressive Liberal Democrat who was probably engaging in insider trading, who made a stock sale and didn’t bother to report the sale as required by Federal laws. You know, the same laws that we have to follow if we don’t want to be put in jail. Here are the details from Fox News:
Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., reported stock sales worth up to $5.5 million earlier this month, months after the transactions were executed and long after such sales are required to be reported under federal law.
On June 14, DelBene — who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, making her one of the highest-ranking House Democrats — filed a periodic transaction report showing her husband sold Microsoft stock worth between $1.25 million and $5.5 million in two transactions on Aug. 30, 2022, and March 1, respectively.
Well, depending on when they bought the Microsoft stock, they might have made a nice piece of change. I have some MS stock and I bought it at around $20/share. Still, if I sell the few shares I have, I don’t have to report it to anyone but the tax people.
Under the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012, members of Congress are legally required to report securities transactions over $1,000 no later than 45 days after they or their spouse execute said transaction. DelBene waited to report the Microsoft stock sales 288 days and 105 days after they took place, her filing showed.
“Members of Congress from both parties are missing these deadlines and not disclosing transactions when they’re supposed to according to the law, which in and of itself, from a first principle standpoint, is a really bad thing because you have lawmakers who are not following the law that they made,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the government affairs manager at the Project on Government Oversight, told Fox News Digital.
There are some who have sales set up in blind trusts or do not directly deal with them. However, this also covers the spouses and they should be reporting it. I’m curious as to how many of these sales are from a Rep’s Husband, wife or if this is a Democrat, whatever, and they either don’t know about it or don’t think it applies to them. I also suspect that these miscreants are long term members and not those who are in their first and second term.
“Oftentimes, if you aggregate members of Congress’ trades and transactions, they tend to over-perform the rest of us and over-perform the market,” Hedtler-Gaudette added. “There is definitely the appearance of impropriety and the appearance of potential corruption there that is corrosive to public trust in Congress and individual members of Congress. So, it’s a big problem.”
There is a reason for this and if anyone else does it, they go to jail. It’s called Insider Trading. The Congress is, apparently, not bound by this law and uses it to enrich themselves.
He added that recent examples of members of Congress violating the STOCK Act strengthen arguments in favor of a blanket prohibition on politicians trading stocks. A recent Insider investigation identified 78 members of Congress who recently violated the legislation. The report found the lawmakers have offered varying excuses and are generally hit with a $200 fine as punishment.
Oh wow. A $200 fine. How horrific. I’m sure that will make these violators think twice.
As you would expect, the Democrat had an excuse. She claims that her husband had set up a forward contract and that the sale was automatically executed. This might be true, but that isn’t the issue. The issue was reporting the sales in a timely manner. When I buy or sell stock, I get a notification within minutes of it being executed.
Still, according to the House Ethics Committee instruction manual, members of Congress are required to report “each purchase, sale, or exchange involving stocks, bonds, commodities futures, or other securities” owned wholly or in part by them, their spouse or their dependent child when the amount of the transaction exceeds $1,000.
I’m a bit confused on that last part, the section on dependent children. Normally dependent children are underage and can’t buy or sell securities. Their parents have to do it for them. If they are legally adults, then technically they are no longer “Dependent children.” I hope someone can clarify this for me and the 2 or three readers of this blog.
“The member missed the deadline for paying the stock transaction. That part is clear,” Kedric Payne, the vice president and general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, told Fox News Digital.
“The constant violations of the law show that the disclosure requirement is not enough,” Payne continued. “The members cannot comply with the filing deadline and sometimes you still have the appearance of conflicts of interest. Therefore, there needs to be restricted where members are not allowed to own individual stocks.”
I have to be honest and question that ban. I once did a contract at a large, well known financial institution. Although I had no dealings with the traders or brokers, and I was a contractor, I still had to go through all the training on handling securities and insider trading. As I recall, there was a built in delay on any trades made by employees who were covered by the rules. (Technically, I wasn’t an employee but followed them anyway to be on the safe side)
Due to an interesting coincidence I have the same last name as a senior VP in the company, and due to my first name coming before his in the alphabet, my name in the address book was ahead of his. I was constantly getting email meant for him that I should not have seen. I was on the phone to the Compliance Department several times a week. (It became a running joke. I would call in and after identifying myself, they would say “Again?” and I would reply “Yup”)
I think the simple answer is blind trusts and using the same trading rules that brokers and others who have access to insider information have, with severe penalties if they violate them. (Expulsion and potential criminal charges) Will this happen? Have you been ordering products from Hunter Biden’s “Pharmacist?”
Thatisall
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