Stock Trades Reported By CT Congressional Reps Show Possible Conflicts

CONNECTICUT — A New York Times investigation published Tuesday raised conflict-of-interest questions about 97 sitting members of Congress, including three representing Connecticut, regarding their stock and other financial asset transactions.

The Times notes there are few restrictions when it comes to members of Congress buying or selling stocks. The Times said the officials cited in the report defended the transactions as proper.

The newspaper analyzed nearly 3,700 trades reported by lawmakers from both parties that posed potential conflicts between their public responsibilities and private finances over a three-year period from 2019-2019.

The Times investigation found that in Connecticut:

Rep. John Larson bought and sold between $1,000 and $15,000 in shared of United HealthGroup while on the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicare, according to the Times.

Larson said in a statement to Patch that the purchase was made by an investment advisor for his individual retirement account, and that he no longer owns any individual stocks.

“The advisor made all day-to-day transactions, and I was not involved in which stocks were bought and sold,” he said in a statement. “The UnitedHealth stock was one of many within the IRA managed by an investment advisor. In 2019, we decided to sell the IRA and the underlying stocks and roll those sales into a Thrift Savings Plan account, the retirement plan available to all federal employees. ”

Larson said he hasn’t owned individual stock since 2019 and his account never impacted his work in Congress. He also said he plans to support legislation that would prohibit members of Congress from trading stock.

Rep. Joe Courtney’s wife bought shares of Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft while the three vied for a cloud-computing contract with the Pentagon. She sold shares in the company, plus shares of Lockheed Martin and Honeywell in 2020.

A spokesperson for Courtney told the Times that the transactions were inadvertently made by an investment advisor when Courtney’s wife changed jobs and opened a retirement account. The shares were liquidated and reported within several weeks of the couple learning of the transaction. The spokesperson also said Courtney supports bills that would ban members of Congress and their spouses from trading individual stocks.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s wife is the beneficiary of a family that purchased between $1.5 and $3.1 million in shares of a wireless communications site owner while he sat on the Senate Commerce Committee. A spokesperson told the Times that Blumenthal owns no individual stock himself. His wife’s trust owns individual stock in Radius Global Infrastructure and Pinterest.

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In some cases, The Times said it found transactions were routine and the connection to any possible influence was tangential, but in others, it was more blatant.

Congress has long been criticized for not imposing stricter regulations on stock trading by its members, despite the potential for conflicts of interest.

» Read the full investigation on the New York Times and see the full list of lawmakers named.