It has been revealed that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her husband Paul sold over $1.5 million worth of stock in Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, just one month before the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a new antitrust lawsuit against the company.
According to the Daily Caller, the financial disclosures filed by Pelosi on January 12th show that they sold 30,000 shares across three days: December 20th, December 21st, and December 28th. As a result, the Pelosis made between $1.5 million and $3 million in total, netting capital gains over $600. Alphabet’s stock has risen by $6.04 since the Pelosis’ sell-off.
The DOJ’s lawsuit was announced on Tuesday, just one month later, claiming that Google has built up a monopoly in the digital ad market by buying out competitors and self-promoting its own products. The company’s stock dropped by $2.71 as a result of the news.
This is not the first time that Pelosi committed an act of apparent insider trading, using her congressional knowledge to sell off a stock shortly before a major government development that negatively impacts said stock. She and her husband previously bought and sold millions of Nvidia stocks before Congress passed a bill subsidizing the American semiconductor industry to the tune of $280 billion.
Pelosi herself repeatedly and publicly opposed any efforts to crack down on congressional stock trading, claiming that members of Congress should be just as free to participate in the “free market economy” as regular American citizens.
On Tuesday, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced a bill forcing lawmakers to place any and all stocks into blind trusts, or else forfeit their shares to the U.S. Treasury, a measure that Pelosi had opposed in prior congressional sessions. As such, he named the legislation “the PELOSI Act.”