(RepublicanInformer.com)- A watchdog group is calling on the Senate Ethics Committee to immediately investigate Democratic Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper, according to Daily Caller News Foundation familiar with the story. The watchdog group claims that Hickenlooper’s recently closed trades were a “clear violation” of ethics rules and federal law.
Hickenlooper disclosed five trades significantly late. The assets were valued at $1.3 million, well above the requirement for disclosure. The STOCK act of 2012 requires members of Congress to disclose trades worth $1000 or more within 30 days. Hickenlooper breached that period for all five of his trades, that ranged from a few months to over a year.
In transactions that involved his wife, she reportedly sold $750,000 and $500,000 of combined shares in Liberty Media, where she is employed, and Liberty Broadband.
Speaking to the Daily Caller, Kendra Arnold, the executive director of Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), a nonpartisan organization that pursues transparency in the government, said that the senator’s actions are inexcusable.
“Late disclosures erode public trust and create a sense that Senators do not have to abide by federal law and ethics rules,” she added.
The foundation wrote a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee saying that, “The laws must be strictly followed in order to reveal whether a Senator has used non-public information for profit or whether his official actions were altered in order to benefit his personal investments,” adding that when disclosures are made so late it becomes more difficult to spot conflicts of interest, making the law to prevent this conflict ineffective.
This is not the first time a member of Congress was suspected of insider trading. Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi, who has an estimated net worth of up to $114.7 million, has been accused of insider trading before, as well as “slow walking” legislation that would impose regulation of the tech industry, in which she is heavily invested.
Through January, Pelosi has netted as much as $30 million on big tech firms, according to the New York Post.
