Loeffler lost his seat to a Democrat, Raphael Warnock, in 2020. And Burr, a moderate, is retiring. His former seat is one of the few pick-up opportunities for Democrats this year.
New York Times investigative reporter Kate Kelly, along with our colleagues Adam Playford and Alicia Parlapiano, recently reviewed thousands of publicly reported transactions by 97 members of Congress or their immediate family members.
Drawing on data from a three-year period, they found more than 3,700 occupations that posed what they described as “potential conflicts between their public responsibilities and their private finances.” Read their survey here.
To get his perspective, I asked Kelly four questions about the turmoil in stock trading. Here is our conversation, slightly edited for length and clarity:
There is already a law in force, the STOCK Act of 2012, which prohibits insider trading by members of Congress. So why do some lawmakers think it needs an update?
The STOCK Act reaffirmed that lawmakers are not allowed to engage in insider trading – no one in the United States is – and it required that they disclose the periodic transactions that they and their immediate family made in stocks, bonds and other financial assets valued at $1,000 or more within 45 days. But the law did nothing to deter those lawmakers and their family members from trading assets that might be influenced by their work in Congress.
Suppose you investigate a catastrophic manufacturing problem in an American-made car and sell stock in the auto company involved days before your committee issues a negative report that sends the stock plummeting. It’s inappropriate and should be against the law, according to many lawmakers. There are other grayer areas, and cases of insider trading against members are quite rare. But the mere fact that Americans see conflicts of interest in congressional trade is already a problem, that’s the sentiment.
Talking to lawmakers about this topic, I get the sense that many don’t appreciate the implication that they’re using their positions to make money on the side. To what extent is what you discovered only an appearance of corruption, as opposed to reality?
It’s entirely the former, though we can’t rule out the latter – we just haven’t uncovered enough evidence to show that any particular instance was insider trading. The scarcity of civil or criminal investigations into these cases makes it difficult to know what is really going on, whether they are essentially routine transactions based on market research and common knowledge or information-inspired trading. learned in Congress.