Democrats Vote to Ban Stock Trading in Congress

A bombshell report from The New York Times yesterday reveals that nearly one-fifth of congressional members are career criminals.

In just the last three years, a whopping 97 members of Congress, including family members, traded stock in sectors that they influence, indicating a clear conflict of interest.

The article states, “From 2019 to 2021, 183 current senators or representatives reported a trade of a stock or another financial asset by themselves or an immediate family member.”

Among those members, “more than half of them sat on congressional committees that potentially gave them insight into the companies whose shares they reported buying or selling.”

Now, we’ve been investigating this corrupt activity in Wealth Daily for some time now, detailing how certain lawmakers profited and continue to profit off the pandemic and the Ukraine war.

Take Sen. Richard Burr, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, for example. In 2019, he gave a closed-door speech to well-connected constituents at the Capitol Hill Club, warning of the seriousness of the coronavirus. He proceeded to unload $1.72 million worth of personal stocks in mid-February, just before the market took a pandemic-related nose dive.

Or how about Rep. Mark Green? According to the Times, “While he was sitting on the House’s special coronavirus subcommittee, Mr. Green and his wife bought shares of General Electric, which got pandemic-related ventilator contracts. The company also contracts with the U.S. military, which is under the purview of another of Mr. Green’s committees.”

And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene purchased American oil stock Chevron (NYSE: CVX), defense contractor Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), and renewable energy company NextEra Energy (NYSE: NEE) just two days before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

This list goes on and on and on.

So why is the Times just now reporting on this?

Is the company turning over a new leaf and exposing the corruption in D.C.?

Hardly.

It just has to cover its bases.

That’s because we just got word that House Democrats are scrambling to pass a bill banning stock trading in Congress.

They're desperate to do anything to make it look like they care about the rule of law.

According to Punchbowl News, “The House Administration Committee’s aides have been briefed on the Democrats’ plan to ban stock trading by members of Congress and their spouses.”

Democrats crafting the bill say the House will vote on the bill later this month.

Skeptical?

You should be.

What’s more likely to happen than an outright ban on trading individual stocks is the creation of blind trusts, where the owner of the trust doesn’t know how the assets are managed.

Texas Republican Chip Roy is sponsoring just such a bill called H.R. 336, which would require members of Congress, including their spouses and dependents, to place stocks into blind trusts.

He sums up the controversy well, saying, “The American people don’t want us day trading for profit, and engaging in active trading of the very equities that are connected to the policies that we are deciding on and voting on every day."

If you’ll remember, President Obama passed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act in 2012, which was supposed to stop these kinds of shenanigans, but even when lawmakers don’t comply with the act, nothing happens to them.

A committee comprised of congressional peers, the so-called Office of Congressional Ethics, briefly reviews the trades and dismisses the cases.

That’s why we and others like the website Insider do our own research. Per the Times article, Insider reported last year that “72 members of Congress had fallen out of compliance with the STOCK Act by making trading disclosures late, inaccurately, or not at all.”

Congress can't serve the American people when its members are busy trading stocks.

And even if they're not technically insider trading, who cares?

The Times article sums it up well:

Like everyone else, members of Congress are subject to laws against insider trading. Even knowledge that would fall short of the legal definition of inside information, though, has the potential to create ethical dilemmas for members of Congress who, on any given day, might be able to glean insights through legislative work, classified briefings or meeting with constituents, donors, corporate executive, regulators, and other government officials.

At this point, it’s not just insider trading they’re guilty of.

Is this not defrauding the taxpayers?

Is it not treasonous to profit with our money while we suffer under unprecedented inflation?

They take our tax dollars to buy stocks and then create laws that positively influence those stocks.

At this point, who can blame them?

I guess we’re all just looking for ways to make money now that inflation sits at 8.3%.

And in some sort of dystopian break with reality, the White House hosted a “celebration” for the passing of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act yesterday, just hours after a new government inflation report showed that consumer prices rose 0.1% in August.

According to The Washington Post, the new law “aims to lower prescription drug costs, address global warming, raise taxes on some billion-dollar corporations, and reduce the federal deficit.”

The only problem is economists unanimously agree that this law won’t reduce inflation.

It’s classic double-speak, something we’ll be seeing a lot more of now that President Biden himself is getting sued.

Biden Lawyers Up

The story starts with Alex Berenson, a former New York Times journalist who tweeted multiple times about his skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccines.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, he wrote the following:

After March 2020, I became a prominent skeptic of the U.S. coronavirus response, arguing that neither “nonpharmaceutical” interventions like masks nor vaccine mandates were likely to change the course of the epidemic. Much of what I wrote, though controversial at the time, is now conventional wisdom. Twitter — open to the public, available globally, and a crucial platform for journalism — was my primary outlet.

But Twitter didn’t take down his posts or ban him from the platform until the White House got involved.

Berenson continues:

On July 16, President Biden said Facebook and other companies were “killing people” by allowing dissenting views about the mRNA vaccines. A few hours later, Twitter locked me out of my account for the first time.

On Aug. 28, the company permanently banned me for a tweet about mRNA COVID vaccines that began: “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission.” Today no one disputes the truth of that statement, but Twitter claimed the tweet was my “fifth strike” under its COVID “misinformation” policy.

Berenson sued Twitter last December…

Two months ago, he won the lawsuit and his account was reinstated.

Now he's suing President Biden for restricting his First Amendment rights.

It’s a case of censorship, government overreach, and — like the the controversial congressional stock trades — abuse of state power to gain influence and silence opponents.

This could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

All the while, the U.S. is staring down the barrel of hyperinflation.

But the big boys on Wall Street will be just fine.

That's because they use a secret trading strategy during times like these…

One that’s PROVEN to keep Wall Street hedge funds afloat during major financial crises and crashes.

The corrupt politicians in D.C. don't even have access to this recession-proof trading secret.

But you can get exclusive access to it today.

Stay frosty,

Alexander Boulden
Editor, Wealth Daily

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After Alexander’s passion for economics and investing drew him to one of the largest financial publishers in the world, where he rubbed elbows with former Chicago Board Options Exchange floor traders, Wall Street hedge fund managers, and International Monetary Fund analysts, he decided to take up the pen and guide others through this new age of investing.

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