But what many saw as a scandal, others saw as an opportunity. Doug Lamborn, Republican of Colorado, bought shares of the same tiny Australian company, Innate Immunotherapeutics. Within two days three more members also bought in — Republicans Billy Long of Missouri, Mike Conaway of Texas and John Culberson of Texas.

Historical Timeline - Insider Trading by Congress - fesajina.web.fc2.com

Conaway added more shares the following week. In the pursuit of wealth, even obvious conflicts of interest are routinely ignored by members who feast on daily trades. Long, for instance, serves on a committee overseeing Obamacare, and Conaway is a deputy House whip.

The health care lawmakers who invested in Innate Immunotherapeutics are hardly alone in trading in companies that have a major interest in federal legislation, according to a three-month investigation and examination of all stock trades by members of Congress. POLITICO found that 28 House members and six senators each traded more than stocks in the past two years, placing them in the potential cross hairs of a conflict of interest on a regular basis.

And a handful of lawmakers, some of them frequent traders and some not, disproportionately trade in companies that also have an interest in their work on Capitol Hill.

Sheldon Whitehousethe Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the Senate HELP Committee, which oversees health care, is a heavy investor in pharmaceutical stocks. Last November, as lawmakers closed in on a bipartisan deal over a significant medical research bill called the 21st Century Cures Act, Whitehouse bought shares in the pharmaceutical firms McKesson, Gilead, and Abbott Labs 10 days before the bill was made public.

Whitehouse and his wife bought additional stock in Gilead and Amgen on Nov.

The day President Barack Obama signed the bill into law, Whitehouse started a series of three sales of shares in those companies. Adam KinzingerRepublican of Illinois, was a guest speaker at Prescient Edge, a small research and technology firm with Defense Department contracts, in January of Kinzinger is now a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which oversees issues affecting Prescient Edge.

Chuck Fleischmann, Republican of Tennesseesits on the health care appropriations panel. One of the investments was made a week before the Obama administration announced new measures that would speed up approval for cancer therapies. Conaway, the Texas Republicanwho is a House deputy majority whip, introduced a bill in late that would pave the way for an area nuclear waste storage facility in his district. Within days, an account owned by Conaway's wife bought stock in a nuclear power company that operated in states surrounding Texas and stood to benefit from a nearby storage facility.

Bob Corker, Republican of Tennesseewas an original cosponsor of a bill to eliminate the oil export ban in He bought shares in Chesapeake Energy, which was part of a coalition of companies pushing for an end to the ban, in the months leading up to Congress passing the energy-friendly legislation. House and Senate members who are active traders insist their buying and selling is a normal part of managing their finances, as with any American who wants to save for retirement or put their kids through school.

The clear majority of lawmakers avoid potential conflicts of interest by buying mutual funds, putting their portfolios in blind trusts or simply staying out of the stock market. POLITICO found that House members and senators who served in the th Congress made no stock trades over the past two years. Meanwhile, the lawmakers who are active in stock trading conducted a total of more than 21, trades during the past two years, but a small group of very wealthy lawmakers accounted for a significant share of those trades.

Mike McCaul — whose wife, Linda, is the daughter of Clear Channel communications founder Lowry Mays — reported approximately 7, stock transactions in an array of industries over the two-year period.

Schrader has made close to stock trades over the past two years. In some cases, these very wealthy lawmakers own significant stakes in private companies that are affected by their legislative work. Hal Rogers traded dozens of stocks while serving as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, which affects a broad array of policy areas.

At the time the bill was passed, many thought the simple fear of exposure and political embarrassment would stop the conflicts of interest. Tim Walz, an early supporter of the Stock Act who does not himself trade stocks. In the months leading up to the vote, more than 1, lobbyists flocked to Capitol Hill to make their case for what should be included in the legislative package.

It was a rare opportunity to forex trading pools draws increase the amount of federal money going into pharmaceuticals.

It was also, as it turned out, a time when some of the members who contributed to the writing of the bill boosted their own portfolios of drug stocks, POLITICO found. Whitehouse, Collins, Price and Fleischmann all invested in pharmaceutical companies over the months that the bill was being pulled together.

Price traded and held multiple medical stocks, including McKesson, while contributing to the 21st Century Cures Act. Collins sat on the boards of multiple medical companies and bought and sold health care stocks while authoring parts of the bill.

S - th Congress (): STOCK Act | fesajina.web.fc2.com | Library of Congress

Whitehouse, the veteran Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, began a series of purchases in health care stocks related to the bill in mid-November, through his own accounts and family accounts. At the time, negotiators were wrestling over the final version of 21st Century Cures and hoping to vote on it in a matter of weeks. Eager to battle prescription-drug addiction in his home state of Rhode Island, Whitehouse pushed leaders to include funding to fight opioid abuse, as well as health IT legislation.

Asked about his trades, Sen. Coles trading hours boxing day 2011 days before lawmakers announced their breakthrough agreement on the bill, Whitehouse, through his and his family's accounts, bought shares in Gilead Sciences, Abbott Laboratories and McKesson, a pharmaceutical and health IT company.

It was the third time that fall that he had bought McKesson shares. Health care negotiators released the home depot stock price target version of 21st Century Cures on a Friday.

The following Monday, Whitehouse purchased more stock in Gilead, as well as shares of the pharmaceutical company Amgen. In just over a week — with lawmakers racing against the December recess — the bill was approved by Congress.

Ten days after President Barack Obama signed it, Whitehouse sold some of his stock in Gilead, Amgen and Biogen. Schrader, of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, also said he did not personally direct his investments. Regarding his purchase of shares in the nuclear company Entergy, which stood to benefit from the storage facility he advocated, Rep. There is a clear procedure to do so, and eight members — including such veteran lawmakers as Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah — have taken the step.

It requires hiring a manager for the trust, drawing up paperwork and submitting it to the House or Senate ethics committee. Once the blind trust is approved, the trustee takes over the fund and, over time, makes decisions stock stop trading on congressional knowledge act buying and selling assets.

If members choose not to set up a blind trust, ethics specialists say, their claims of not being involved in their investments inevitably ring hollow. In such investments, fund managers make the decisions to buy and sell. Now, after seeing how members are continuing to trade stocks despite the potential conflicts of interest, ethics specialists are convinced there need to be tougher laws.

Indeed, if Whitehouse, Collins or Fleischmann worked at the White House or a federal agency, they could face an investigation simply for working on the health care bill while holding stocks that had an interest in the bill — regardless of whether those holdings had any effect on their decisions. When the need for tougher conflict-of-interest laws has been broached in the past, lawmakers have often offered two rationales for opposing them: It would be difficult to avoid conflicts of interest given the range of interests that are affected by legislation, and disclosures would does best buy charge restocking fee the necessary deterrent effect.

When former Washington state Democratic Rep. Others said it would be too burdensome to have to file all their trades wap means in stock market the ethics offices. Baird saw another reason why lawmakers opposed the plan: He proposed requiring lawmakers to quickly disclose their stock trades, and mandating that political intelligence operatives — who specialize in relaying Capitol Hill information to Wall Street investors — register like lobbyists do.

Baird and House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter D-N. Its subjects included House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who had participated in a profitable IPO for Visa while Congress was considering legislation that would have hurt credit card companies.

Within days, lawmakers leapt into action and added their names as cosponsors by the dozen. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, keen to put new checks on Pelosi, joined reform-minded Democrats to lead the charge.

The Stock 100 free trades optionshouse was swept into law by the following April. The final bill barred lawmakers from how to add checkbox in microsoft word document trading, as Baird had proposed, and required members to report all trades within 30 days.

The political intelligence component was stripped from the bill by Cantor. Since its passage, the Stock Act appears to have deterred some lawmakers from making trades. So far, no one has been convicted of insider trading under the Stock Act. And when the Securities and Exchange Commission sought to enforce the act in recent years, it ran up against sweeping opposition in Congress.

That case involves a former Ways and Means Committee staff director, who allegedly leaked information that Medicare reimbursement rates were about to rise in The tip found its way to a political intelligence firm, Height Securities, which sent information to hedge funds that rushed to buy stock in Humana, a company that benefited from the rate hike.

When the SEC subpoenaed documents and interviews related to its investigation, House counsel refused to comply. That could effectively knock out the biggest deterrence to conflicts of interest. For example, during a trip to his home state of Illinois last January, Kinzinger, who has represented the exurbs of Chicago sincewent downtown to address a group of business executives.

His after-lunch topic was national security, a subject near and dear to his heart as a former Air Force pilot. The hosts of the luncheon — a small security and research firm called Prescient Edge — were soon to be of personal interest to Kinzinger, too: Meanwhile, the notion that members would police themselves closely because of fear of voter backlash has rarely materialized. Especially in the House, a significant group of lawmakers represent safe districts where their reelection campaigns rarely grab headlines.

Kinzinger, for one, ran unopposed in From his perch on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Corker, whose seat in red-state Tennessee is considered secure, has made a number of large stock trades over the years.

Three days after Obama signed the bill, Corker again bought Chesapeake Energy stock, which he soon sold at a profit. At the time, the possibility that other lawmakers might hear those calls and still buy stock in the same firm seemed beyond possibility.

The company has no approved drugs on the market and little name recognition in the U. Lamborn, Long and Culberson, three of the lawmakers who bought shares in the company, each said they heard of Innate Immunotherapeutics through public channels.

In addition, the POLITICO investigation revealed that yet another House member, Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, had bought Innate Immunotherapeutics before the flare-up during Price's confirmation hearing. Mullin's office did not respond to requests for comment. Lawmakers envisioned Google-like search data enabling voters to quickly pull up who had traded stocks ahead of market-moving events.

But Congress quietly stripped the data requirements out of the law a year after it was passed. Currently, the data is available online but not easily searchable. Experts like Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, think the idea should be resurrected — and that lawmakers should be required to disclose much more specific information about the value of their assets and trades.

Currently, they report trades within a wide dollar range. But the solution that would settle concern about conflicts of interest in the big picture, Holman and others argue, would be either to bar lawmakers from buying and selling stocks entirely, or require them to put their money into broad mutual or index funds.

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