Key Points
- Nancy Pelosi continues to draw fire for her comments defending public stock trading by members of congress.
- Podcast host Joe Rogan is the latest to point out the absurdity of the Speaker’s defense.
- 49 members of Congress and 182 Capitol staffers were late in reporting their 2020/21 stock trades.
As reported earlier this month by The Drill Down Staff, Nancy Pelosi was forced to defend her stance on public stock trading privileges for politicians when presented with the fact that 49 members of Congress and 182 Capitol staffers were late in reporting their 2020/21 stock trades.
This violates the STOCK Act, famously signed into law in 2012 following the release of the Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer’s book Throw Them All Out; Schweizer uncovered an epidemic of lawmakers, from both parties, trading on insider info.
“Should members of Congress and their spouses be banned from trading individual stocks while serving in Congress?” one reporter asked Pelosi.
“No…we have a responsibility to report on the stocks. I’m not familiar with that 5-month review but if people aren’t reporting, they should be,” Pelosi answered. “This is a free-market economy. [Members of Congress] should be able to participate in that.”
Now, podcast host Joe Rogan is taking Nancy to task on her skittish response.
“Have you ever seen a person look more nervous?” Rogan says. “She’s giving this like very simplistic, almost vague answer. Because should you be allowed to participate in the stock market when you’re influencing the direction of the stock, or when you know which direction something’s going to go in? Or when you’re going to pass a law that’s going to benefit these businesses, that’s going to force the stock to go up, and you know that, so you invest a sh*t ton of money before it happens? That seems like it’s a problem. That seems like it’s a problem. Now why is that not a problem?”
Nancy and her husband Paul are worth more than $200 million dollars. Nancy is in the top ten richest members of congress and faces frequent accusations that she leverages insider information to line her pockets. As previously reported, in 2008, Pelosi and her husband got special access to Visa’s Initial Public Offering and purchased shares valued between $1 million and $5 million. Beginning in 2009, financial disclosures reveal that Pelosi’s husband, Paul, has a history of purchasing Amazon call options around the Pentagon’s JEDI program-related milestones.
“It’s a genius con game,” Rogan adds. “What it is, is like a virus finds its way through the system…They’re playing a game that’s illegal to play. Like if you know, specifically, that’s how they put Martha Stewart away, isn’t it? Wasn’t it insider trading? Yeah, so what is insider trading? It’s like, you know something, and because you know something, you can’t make a move on the market because you have inside information. Is that exactly what it is?”
Yes, Joe. That’s exactly what it is and why we need the original, non-gutted version of the STOCK Act to be restored if we ever hope to get this kind of corruption out of politics.
