Did former House Speaker (man, that was fun to write) Nancy Pelosi (D-Absolut) know something to which ordinary mortals were not privy? It sure seems that way, and not for the first time, either: according to a Wednesday report in the Washington Free Beacon, Pelosi and her husband (you know, Pauly the Hammer) “sold up to $3 million in shares of Google in recent weeks—just before the Biden Justice Department launched an antitrust probe of the tech giant.” Wow, what an amazing coincidence! Nancy and Paul Pelosi must be the savviest stock traders in history, right? Or could there possibly be an alternative explanation?
The Free Beacon reported that “Paul Pelosi sold 30,000 shares of Google from Dec. 20 to Dec. 28, according to a financial disclosure filing the former House speaker submitted to the House Ethics Committee. The Pelosis made an undisclosed profit from the investments, according to the filing.” Why did the Pelosis choose that particular time to offload these Google shares? Did they have some knowledge of something that would cause Google’s stock to decline in value? Or are they just economic wizards who divined somehow that it would be a good time to make a bit of money selling Google stock?
After all, Nancy Pelosi’s net worth is $135 million. The annual salary of the speaker of the House is $210,000, so even though Pelosi has been in the House since Ronald Reagan called upon Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, there is no amount of frugality and pinching pennies till they scream that would account for that fortune on her salary alone. Apparently, Nancy and the Hammer have mastered the intricacies of stock trading to a degree that would make the most seasoned Wall Street trader slack-jawed with awe. Do they ever make a stock trade that proved to be ill-advised and loses them money? If such a thing ever happens, clearly it’s vanishingly rare.
So why don’t the Pelosis start a stock-trading clinic and share their secrets with others so that the rest of the world can benefit from their remarkable acumen? Well, maybe there’s another reason why they’ve gotten so rich. Maybe they’re just amazingly lucky. Maybe Nancy Pelosi can read tea leaves. Or maybe, just maybe, she and Pauly the Hammer have profited from the insider knowledge to which she has had access as a congresswoman and speaker of the House in order to enrich themselves. Surely the Pelosis, whom everyone knows are as honest and upright as the Bidens, wouldn’t do that, would they?
There are reasons to ask the question. The Free Beacon notes that the Pelosis’ Google transaction “proved timely,” for “on Monday, the Justice Department and attorneys general from eight states—including California—sued Google over its monopoly on the digital ad market. The lawsuit could force Google to break up its online ad business, which generated nearly $55 billion in revenue for the company in the most recent quarter. Google’s stock has dropped around 6 percent since the Justice Department announced the lawsuit.” Did Pelosi know this suit was coming? Surely not! As the leader of the House Democrats up until very recently, she wouldn’t have had any communications with Old Joe Biden’s Gestapo, a.k.a. the Justice Department, now would she? The very idea would be inconceivable!
And yet… and yet… this is not the first time that the Pelosis have hit the jackpot in a manner that raised eyebrows. The Free Beacon points out that they “saved roughly $600,000 in June by selling shares of microchip maker Nvidia weeks before the U.S. government placed restrictions on the company’s business in China and Russia.” Here again, what an amazing coincidence!
Related: It Sure Sounds Like Nancy Pelosi Committed a Federal Felony on January 6
And now, the new House is taking notice, and some representatives are calling for legislation that would restrict our elected officials’ ability to get rich on their access to information that the great unwashed do not have. The Free Beacon reported that “Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) on Tuesday introduced” the deliciously named “Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act—the PELOSI Act—to prohibit members of Congress and their spouses from owning or trading individual stocks.”
Hawley declared: “For too long, politicians in Washington have taken advantage of the economic system they write the rules for, turning profits for themselves at the expense of the American people. As members of Congress, both Senators and Representatives are tasked with providing oversight of the same companies they invest in, yet they continually buy and sell stocks, outperforming the market time and again.” If a semblance of sanity is going to return to Washington, this gravy train has to end. But do too many of our “public servants” make too much money from it to vote for it to stop?
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