The Washington Free Beacon reports that U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the former speaker of the House, sold $3 million in Google stock just weeks before the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google.
The Beacon got this information from a financial disclosure filing that Pelosi submitted to the House Ethics Committee. That form shows that Pelosi sold 30,000 shares of Google during the period between Dec. 20 to Dec. 28, 2022.
It was last Tuesday - just weeks after Pelosi's sale - that the DOJ filed its lawsuit against Google.
Yahoo Finance reports:
The Justice Department’s alleges that Google's suite of online advertising tools prevents competitors from entering the online advertising market and blocks publishers from monetizing their own content. The department further claims that Google is illegally using, or trying to use, its monopoly power, and should be required to divest a host of entities that allow it to carry out the allegedly offending behavior.
Suffice it to say that Google might be in trouble here, which makes Pelosi's sale of Google stock particularly timely.
In fact, for many, Pelosi's sale is just a bit too timely to be a coincidence.
As conservative activist James Bradley put it, "you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder how Nancy Pelosi knew to sell off $3 million of her Google stock 4 WEEKS before the DOJ opened their tech monopoly lawsuit against them."
Not only that, but Pelosi and her husband have a history of this sort of thing.
The Daily Wire, for example, reports:
Paul Pelosi appeared to have cut losses in software company Nvidia last year before the United States placed new restrictions on computer chip sales to China and Russia.
Examples like this can be multiplied. And, critics argue that this is how Pelosi and her husband have managed to amass a fortune - of over $200 million - despite only being a government employee on a government salary.
Pelosi, in fact, is one of the main reasons why there is a push to pass legislation to ban members of Congress from stock trading while in office. Pelosi is far from the only member of Congress to have conducted such suspicious stock transactions.
In response to Pelosi's latest stock trade, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced the "PELOSI Act."
Breitbart reports:
Hawley’s PELOSI Act would ban members of Congress and their spouses from holding, acquiring, or selling stocks while in office. The legislation gives members and their spouses six months after taking office to divest stocks they hold or put them in a blind trust. If members of Congress or their spouses are found to be in violation of the legislation’s rules, they would have to forfeit any profits to the United States Treasury.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has vowed, in the past, to place greater scrutiny on stock trades by members of Congress. It remains to be seen if Pelosi, now that McCarthy is speaker, will face this greater scrutiny for her latest sale.
