Stock Trades Reported By PA Congressional Reps Show Possible Conflicts

PENNSYLVANIA — A New York Times investigation published this month raises conflict-of-interest questions about whether 97 sitting members of Congress, including four representing Pennsylvania, acted on insider information from their committee work when they or immediate
family members sold stock, bonds or other financial assets.

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.

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.

Here’s the full list of Pennsylvania lawmakers named in The Times investigation:

• Rep. Dwight Evans (D)

• Rep. Mike Kelly (R)

• Rep. Dan Meuser (R)

• Sen. Patrick Toomey (R)

According to the Times, Mr. Evans sold his shares in Pfizer in March 2020, more than a year after entering Congress and joining the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health, which oversees Medicare.

“I put money into an account every month for retirement, and I leave the decisions on which stocks to buy or sell to my financial adviser,” he said in a statement.

According to the Times, Mr. Kelly’s wife traded shares of several health care companies while he was sitting on the House Ways and Means Committee Health Subcommittee, although she had sold off those holdings by June 2019.

Mr. Kelly is also the subject of a House ethics investigation over a 2020 stock trade. In that transaction, his wife bought $15,000 to $50,000 in shares of the mining company Cleveland-Cliffs one day after Mr. Kelly’s office learned that the Commerce Department would initiate a tariff investigation that might benefit the company, said the Times. The trade happened before that news was made public. (The company is not included in The Times's analysis because it did not directly intersect with Mr. Kelly’s committee work.)

Mr. Kelly, who did not cooperate with the ethics office’s initial investigation, has described his wife’s Cleveland-Cliffs purchase as a show of support for the company, which operates a plant in his district that employs more than 1,100 people, reports the Times. A 2021 letter from Mr. Kelly’s lawyer to House ethics staffers said Mr. Kelly and his spouse had acted properly.

Mr. Kelly did not respond to requests for comment.

According to the Times, Mr. Meuser reported sales by his children in two pharmaceutical companies in 2019 and 2020, while serving as a member of the House Committee on Education and Labor, which has worked on drug pricing legislation.

His office did not respond to requests for comment.

According to the Times, Senator Toomey reported sales and purchases of financial stocks and bonds, some in a joint account and some by one of his children, while serving as a member of the Senate Banking Committee in 2019. In June 2021, after becoming the ranking Republican on the
committee, Mr. Toomey purchased $2,000 to $30,000 in shares of trusts dedicated to holding the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum.

In his role on the committee, Mr. Toomey has tried to make it easier to use cryptocurrencies for daily purchases and pushed to create a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, reports the Times. Just days before he bought shares in those trusts, he also sent a letter to the Treasury Department criticizing a proposal to track cryptocurrency in a government program that monitors potential money laundering.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Toomey said in a statement to the Times: “Through a highly diversified portfolio, Senator Toomey is invested in every sector of the economy. Cryptocurrency accounts for less than 1 percent of his overall assets. His advocacy for cryptocurrency investors is no more a conflict of interest than his career-long advocacy for economic growth and free markets.”

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