Nancy Pelosi’s Recent Tesla Stock Purchase Raises Alarm of Congress Insider Trading

Does the US Congress have an insider trading problem? The truth is that elected US official are largely above the law on this issue, and have been allowed to amass personal fortunes for years on the back of their office. How has this situation been allowed to persist in a country which likes to market itself internationally as a transparent and pristine democracy? 

This situation may have come to a head this week, after the Democratic Party’s House leader Nancy Pelosi made some rather convenient stock purchases last month which are only now raising questions as the ethics and legality of Congresspeople buying and selling stocks which are directly affected by government announcement and laws which those elected officials have advanced knowledge of, and in some cases – are themselves directly involved in the decision making of those events.

Back in December, Nancy Pelosi (who has managed to amass a personal fortune of around $150 million during her time in Congresss) purchased 25 call options of Tesla stock, along with a few other major purchases. Then low and behold, the Biden administration’s suddenly announced its environmental protection agenda to combating climate change,which included Biden’s campaign to encourage Americans to buy electric vehicles, providing tax credits to buyers, and other government incentives. But the big move happened on Monday when Biden announced he would be replacing the federal government’s entire fleet of some 645,000 vehicles with electric cars and SUVs.

Pelosi and her husband (and who knows who else connected with her and the party) have already benefit financially from these political policy moves. This is corruption on an epic scale.

What can be done? Will anything be done?

Can government regulators or mainstream media hold Pelosi and her cohort to account for profiting off of insider trading?

Refinery 29 reports…

Nancy Pelosi made some stock purchases last month that are raising eyebrows — and questions — about the ethics of Congresspeople buying and selling stocks. In December, Rep. Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, purchased 25 call options of Tesla stocks, along with a few other stock purchases. Why does this matter? Because under the Biden administration’s new agenda, with its focus on environmental protections and combating climate change, Pelosi could benefit financially from those political plans.

President Joe Biden is currently encouraging the purchase of electric vehicles, and that could mean lifting the cap on sales, providing tax credits to buyers, and a potential program incentivizing people to trade in used vehicles to buy an electric one. Biden also announced on Monday that he would be replacing the entire fleet of 645,000 federal vehicles with electric ones. This could create a conflict of interest, as part of Pelosi’s job will include working to pass these environmental and clean energy initiatives — initiatives from which her family now stands to profit handsomely.

According to the disclosure, Pelosi (or her husband, Paul, who runs a venture capital firm) purchased call options at a stake price of $500. Since the calls were bought last month, shares of Tesla have risen from $640.34 to over $890. The call options are now valued at $1.12; they were purchased for between $500,000 and $1 million.

Questions of whether it’s ethical for members of Congress to buy and sell stock are not new. Last year, former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler was accused of insider trading and profiting off the coronavirus pandemic when she sold between $1.275 million and $3.1 million in stocks right after being briefed in January 2020 about the seriousness of the virus. In June of 2020, the investigation was dismissed by a Senate ethics panel. And since then, Loeffler lost her seat in the Senate to Democrat Raphael Warnock.

Another former Georgia Senator, David Perdue, was also criticized for potentially unethical stock purchases during the six years he spent in Congress. The Republican was investigated by the Justice Department for his stock market activity, though no wrongdoing was found (he, too, lost his recent re-election campaign to a Democrat, Jon Ossoff).

In the past, there has been legislation aimed at combating this. The STOCK Act, passed after the 2008 financial crisis, attempted to stop insider trading by making it illegal for government officials to trade stocks after receiving material or nonpublic information “derived” from their jobs, or information that they received while performing their jobs. In light of the Loeffler and Perdue activity, that bill has been re-examined and some people have argued it did not go far enough.

“Given that Congress’ first obligation is to the American people and that serving that obligation so often requires having more knowledge than ordinary American investors, why should members of Congress be permitted to trade individual stocks at all?” Tyler Gellasch, a former Senate staffer who helped draft the STOCK Act, wrote last year in a piece for Politico. “Why should we expect them to even be capable when making business decisions of separating what they know as a result of their governmental job and what they might otherwise know as private individuals?”

Continue this story at Refinery 29

21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.