Congressional stock trading has been the topic of many pieces of legislation this past decade, but the U.S. is entering a new era with the Trump administration. After tariff movements that led to Democratic lawmakers proposing a ban on congressional stock trading, one journalist says it is a rare occasion where both sides are on the same page at the same time.
In this episode, George Headley speaks with Dave Levinthal, an investigative journalist and former deputy editor at Business Insider. Levinthal has examined politicians who have violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act and reported award-winning content throughout the years. He says covering this topic is a passion project of his and allows him to continue to produce watchdog journalism aimed at those in power.
Transcript
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George Headley: Welcome to “We Mean Business.” This is “Drive to Work with George Headley.” In this series, I talk to people about what drives them to work on highlighting the issues they believe are important. After President Donald Trump’s tariff movements in April, several Democrat lawmakers have introduced legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stock while in office. Republican lawmakers did the same thing in 2023 with the introduction of the “Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act,” or the PELOSI Act. But this is not the first time congressional stock trading has been in controversy. Ever since the implementation of the STOCK Act in 2012, examining how politicians go about trading stock or the actual enforcement of the act itself can be difficult and sometimes nearly impossible to pinpoint. However, for journalists like Dave Levinthal, the former deputy editor at Business Insider and an investigative journalist, reportage on congressional stock trading opens the door for how we should examine politicians and their market activity, as well as what we could see in the future. I spoke with Levinthal about his past reportage on the topic and his perspective on what we’ve seen this past year since the Trump administration took office in January. Welcome to “We Mean Business: Drive to Work with George Headley.”
Headley: You did an investigation back in 2023 on violations of the Stock Act with around 70 politicians in regard to missed deadlines, failure to disclose finances. But we’re entering a new era of this sort of predicament. What are some things that you’ve noticed this past year that seem relevant to what you saw two years ago?
Dave Levinthal: The biggest top line takeaway is that we’re seeing in 2025 an increased bipartisan acceptance of bills that would ban or limit how lawmakers are able to personally buy and sell stocks and other types of financial implements that are concerning to some lawmakers, that they can be abused, and that lawmakers can use inside information, information that they’ve gleaned by virtue of them being a member of Congress. And they’re privy to private hearings or privy to all sorts of information in the course of their work as elected lawmakers serving on Capitol Hill that either directly at its worst or indirectly, can inform trades that somebody might make in their personal capacity. And I should note, too, that most members of Congress are a heck of a lot wealthier than the average American. Many lawmakers have millions, even tens of millions of dollars worth of assets that they can bring to bear in a personal capacity, and sometimes they have people working for them to manage their money that they work with. So when you add this all up, it creates a situation where Congress and members of Congress definitely are in a class unto themselves, relative to most people who are trading stocks. And they also have a law that they have to abide by, or are supposed to abide by, which is called the Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge Act, passed in 2012, and it serves to more or less police this very matter that we’re talking about right now, which is ensuring that members of Congress are not, of course, using insider information, but are also avoiding conflicts of interest that might arise. And that’s why the STOCK Act is very specific about what lawmakers have to do in order to disclose the trades that they are making, because they still can legally buy and sell stocks. But the STOCK Act put that provision in place to basically defend against gross conflicts of interest. So for example, if you serve on the House Armed Services Committee or the Senate Armed Services Committee and you have a hearing coming up where you’re going to have a whole bunch of defense contractors talking about this, that or the other thing, and you’re day trading and buying and selling all sorts of stock, and Boeing and Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin and lots of defense contractors. Well, you know that might be problematic to some of your constituents, or Americans writ large, and that’s why that exists. So the fact that we’re having a conversation in 2025 about what could we do that would be better than what just simply exists right now, and that conversation is being very much driven both by Democrats on the far left, people like Rashida Talib and Ro Khanna and Mark Pocan, far left lawmakers for many respects, and then also on the right, people like Senator Josh Hawley and Chip Roy, who are about as conservative as you’re going to get, but are exactly on the same page with their far left counterparts. I mean, that’s not common here in Washington, D.C., and the fact that that’s happening right now is notable. And then finally, you’ve had people like President Donald Trump, who said, “Oh yeah, I could get behind this,” and has given sort of his tacit blessing to a congressional stock trading ban. And there’s nothing to say that any of the several bills that have been introduced that hit on this issue are going to go forward, but the conditions are ripe for that to happen, above and beyond what we’ve seen in the past couple of congressional cycles, where there was some progress made.
Headley: During your investigation into a lot of these violations of the stock trading act, where were the investigative strategies that you guys implemented to actually identify these politicians, and is it still difficult or easy to actually figure out what politicians are doing?
Levinthal: You have to know where to look, and you have to have built up some expertise in what is a pretty arcane part of government in order to identify and be able to confirm that a violation has taken place. And there’s also a lot of shoe leather reporting that you must marry with digging through reams of documents. Every day, there’s a database, one in the House and another in the Senate, that updates any trade that has been disclosed by a member of Congress. If you want to go five steps beyond that, there’s a separate database, literally you can only access it while physically at the U.S. Capitol, that will list the same information for high-ranking congressional staffers, people like chiefs of staff or or top attorneys, or communications directors. So if you know where to look and you know how to follow this stuff, then you can begin to kind of systematically track it in a way where you can say, “Oh, well, this new report that came out, Congress person so and so said that they made a whole bunch of stock trades. But wait, it’s June 13 right now, and they made the stock trades back in January. That’s not right, because the STOCK Act provides a 45-day window where members of Congress, if they make a stock trade or a crypto trade or a bond trade, they have to go ahead and disclose the fact that they made that trade within 45 days of doing so, maximum. And if they go beyond that, then you are in violation of the STOCK Act’s disclosure provision. So, I just published a story about Shelley Pingree, the representative from Maine in the first district there, violating the STOCK Act. And I’ve personally found, let’s see, four now since March, so pretty much one a month of members of Congress who have also violated the STOCK Act, including one very high-profile member, Jamie Raskin. He violated the STOCK Act back in April, and this wasn’t the first time he did it. So what do you make of that? Well, the current system right now is clearly not doing its job well enough to prevent members from violating existing law. Hence the debate that’s going forward about whether there should be more laws or stronger laws, or whether the STOCK Act should be rewritten in a way to to kind of fill the holes that seem to exist that the STOCK Act, as it’s written currently, right now, is not necessarily living up to the level of efficacy that it was that lawmakers hoped it would have back in 2012 when this was first originally passed.
Headley: Is this a pattern we’re seeing where a solution is brought up to Congress and it’s faded out because a lot of politicians are either agreeing or disagreeing regarding stock trading within the actual congressional system?
Levinthal: Yeah, it’s been fascinating watching this and following it very closely. So when I was deputy editor of Business Insider, I led a project that was called “Conflicted Congress.” And initially, it was about a 30-part project about this topic broadly. And then we continued and wrote dozens of additional stories over the next year, going into 2022, that followed up on all of the news that we had broken. But early on, after the project initially published, there was a press conference on Capitol Hill. A reporter who worked on my team, Brian Metzger, fantastic reporter, and he went to a press conference and he asked Nancy Pelosi, “Hey, Business Insider just published this project, and here’s what we found. And do you think that members of Congress need to be banned from trading stocks because we’ve found all these problems?” And she said, and I paraphrase, “Well, hey, it’s a free market economy, and members of Congress should be able to participate in it, and no, I don’t think that members of Congress should be banned.” Well, her saying that got played on every last conservative TV news outlet, but it also got picked up everywhere, and this clip just kept running and running and running, and it created a pitched conversation that really has never stopped since. And then that project, I think, helped inspire some absolutely incredible work that was done by other news organizations, including the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica, among others, who looked at other aspects of this debate about members of the executive branch and what they’re doing and not doing, and then certainly members of the Supreme Court and their financial conflicts, which are pretty eye opening. So the public, I think, became much more aware of the fact that lawmakers and elected officials are not only very rich, but sometimes they are making active financial decisions for themselves that do seem, at minimum, to be in theoretical conflict with their public service. A lot of people who are good government ethics people make the point that all of these officials absolutely should be held to a higher standard. And some of them have come straight out and said, “I am going to hold myself to a higher standard.” I reported a few weeks back about Congressman George Whiteside, who decided that he was just simply going to stop trading stocks. He wasn’t going to do it anymore. And I put the question to him, “Well, why?” And he said, very simply, “because I think it’s the ethical thing to do, and I want to avoid not only actual conflicts of interest, but the perception of conflicts of interest.”
Headley: What are some of the most common violations of the stock trading act that you’ve seen in your reportage, either intentionally or accidentally?
Levinthal: The straight-up legal violations are almost exclusively on the disclosure and transparency front. And they come in all different forms and fashions and flavors, and the little bitty ones are somebody was a week late making a disclosure of a stock trade of 1,000 bucks. Okay, in the scheme of things, is that a corrupting factor for them and their work in Congress? Probably not, okay, but still it’s a technical violation of the STOCK Act. On the other end of the spectrum, there have been members of Congress who have made dozens or even hundreds of trades that, taken together, are valued well into the millions of dollars, and they just simply never get disclosed. And then you finally find out about it, and then you find out that they have all of these stock trades that seem to be very much in conflict with work that they were doing up on Capitol Hill. Then there’s this stuff where we touched on a moment ago, the ethical aspects of this, where it’s not illegal to buy stock in a tech company right before the CEO of that tech company comes and testifies before your congressional committee. That is not in the STOCK Act as something that is patently illegal, but, my goodness, it raises ethical issues. When we’re talking about a stock ban, that is one of the arguments for people who support a stock ban in Congress that it’s not just the actual conflicts of interest, it’s also the perception of conflicts, or putting yourself in a position where the public may feel like its trust in you is betrayed, or that you’re out for yourself and your own pocketbook more than you are the best interests of the people who you’ve been elected to represent and serve. So that is another aspect of it. The final aspect of it is the kinds of violations that truly would be insider trading violations. Using congressional knowledge that you get by virtue of being a member of Congress. And this really came, probably in the past few years, came to the biggest head when there were several members of the U.S. Senate who made a flurry of stock trades right before everything shut down in March of 2020 – Dianne Feinstein, who has since died, Kelly Leffler, who was a Senator, now administrator of the the Small Business Administration in the Trump administration. Richard Burr, who is no longer a Senator and had a criminal investigation opened into him. None of them were criminally charged, and that’s about as close as we got to an insider trading situation where the STOCK Act was not being civilly enforced, as it typically is through the ethics committees of the House and the Senate where they have jurisdiction, but criminally enforced through the Department of Justice, where this would have gone had there actually been a criminal prosecution, that never did come to pass.
Headley: I really want to know your perspective. What are some of the elements that you find very difficult to uncover, difficult to verify, or you just simply didn’t have the ability to actually delve deep into?
Levinthal: Unless we develop telepathy, we don’t know truly what’s going on in the mind of a lawmaker when they make a stock trade. What I mean by that is, if you have a lawmaker who has a conversation, finds out insider information, and then they call their stock broker, or they send a message to their money manager, or they themselves go and they make a stock trade that day or later that week, but that trade is being informed by private information. How do you prove that it was actually that information that prompted them to make that trade? You can even find out that they got information that would be useful for making stock trades that would be advantageous to their bottom line. You could see that they made the stock trade. But in terms of connecting both of those ends together in a way where it would provide you enough evidence to form a successful criminal prosecution, that’s insanely difficult, and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve never had a successful STOCK Act criminal prosecution. I say that from many lawyers and folks like that who I’ve talked to over the years when I’ve posed that same question to them. So you would almost certainly need audio recordings or rock-solid, concrete documentation that showed, “Yes, I am acting on information that I got as a member of Congress and turning around and buying or selling stock off that information.” I mean, they would have to, in essence, spell out every last detail and have it right there, which would be shambolically stupid for them to do. And most members of Congress are smart enough to know not to do that if they’re going to do something that is tantamount to financial shenanigans. So that’s why that really hasn’t happened. It is very, very difficult to prove to a standard where they could be convicted in a court. Even if it smells terrible, even if it looks terrible, even if the proverbial optics are awful, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to have a trial and get a conviction out of it. This is something that seems to unite everyone. When you talk to Democrats, Republicans and Independents, that the vast majority of people of all sorts just think that this is dirty, and many don’t even believe you when you say, “Well, yeah, it’s perfectly legal for a member of Congress to buy and sell all the stock that they want to.” I didn’t mention it, but when I was editor-in-chief of Raw Story in 2023 and 2024 we also did a project that was similar, in the same spirit of “Conflicted Congress” that dealt with the congressional cycle. It was called “Lawmakers, Lawbreakers.” It had won a bunch of awards, and we found 60 additional members of Congress who had violated the STOCK Act. So you know, all told, I think either myself or my team, we’ve identified more than 100 members of Congress who had violated the STOCK Act. Add it all up, and it’s been a wild ride.
Headley: I mean, obviously, I assume this is a very major part of your investigative journalism career, but would you say it’s the leading interest of yours?
Levinthal: I’ve always been fascinated with the interplay of power and politics, and money is the currency of that, much if not most of the time. So sometimes that has led me in the direction of looking at campaign money. So much of my work has been throughout my career in that direction. Sometimes it’s looking at the world of lobbying and how that works, and how the levers of power are pushed and pulled and manipulated by corporate forces that want something out of government, or other types of forces that want something out of government and are willing to do lots of things in order to get what they want. And then lately this has been, not the only thing I do, far from it, but definitely a passion project journalistically, where there were just very few reporters who were looking in this area, and there was, to me, just so much that was underappreciated, undertold, not known at all, and in very fertile ground for doing reporting that was going to be revelatory reporting that was going to surprise a lot of people, and reporting that was going to have a really hardcore watchdog edge to it. Which, if there’s one straight thread from when I was editor-in-chief of the Daily Orange at Syracuse University to this afternoon, it’s been reporting that really holds people who are in a position of authority, a position of power of any sort, accountable for their words and accountable for their actions and looking at how they can personally benefit from decisions that have an effect on other people out there who may be relying on them to do a good job. That can make for a lot of good journalism. It’s been, especially for the past four years, plus years, five years almost, you know, a big part of of my work, and definitely a portion of my career that I’m very proud of the work that myself and my associates and colleagues that I’ve worked with I have been able to do and really break some news on.
Headley: That was Dave Levinthal, an investigative journalist and former deputy editor at the Business Insider and former editor-in-chief at Raw Story, and this is “We Mean Business: Drive to Work with George Headley.”
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