House Speaker Nancy Pelosi better find a new successor.
Assistant House Speaker Katherine Clark (D–Mass.) missed a deadline for disclosing her financial transactions, which may total more than a quarter of $1 million.
Now Clark is facing complaints for allegedly violating the 2012 Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act — better known as the STOCK Act.
The STOCK Act prohibits congressmembers from making financial decisions based on nonpublic information learned in Congress — a practice known as insider trading. It prohibits the use of nonpublic information for private profit.
The act made headlines during Congress’s insider trading scandal last year. Several congressmembers sold stock in companies vulnerable to the pandemic the same day as private briefing for the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
The private sector hadn’t yet been warned about the full extent of the pandemic, and the stock market crashed shortly afterward, in February 2020.
In March 2020, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into the scandal, but it has since closed the case without prosecuting anyone.
Still, the STOCK Act has kept Americans’ attention. The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) complained to the Office of Congressional Ethics last week and asked the office to investigate Assistant Speaker Clark, the latest target of government watchdogs.
According to the Library of Congress, Section 6 of the STOCK Act requires Congressmembers to “file reports within 30 to 45 days after receiving notice of a purchase, sale, or exchange which exceeds $1,000 in stocks, bonds, commodities futures, and other forms of securities.”
On June 4, Clark’s husband traded stocks in pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, data management company Iron Mountain, Google’s Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., and many, many more. Clark waited until Aug. 15 to disclose her husbands transactions, the ethics complaint states, according to Fox Business.
Clark is close to Pelosi. After all, she is serving as Assistant House Speaker to Pelosi’s role as House Speaker.
By missing her deadline, Clark faces investigation… and she also called Pelosi’s financial transactions into question.
Sure enough, the speaker’s husband, Paul Pelosi, sold his shares in a cybersecurity firm for $700,000, approximately a year after buying them.
Speaker Pelosi claims not to have met with any representatives of the firm, but she is still profiting from her husband’s transactions.
Amazing how she’s managed to make millions of dollars from her years as a “public servant.”
The Horn editorial team