This Is Why Sen. Hawley Introduced the PELOSI Act

Where’s there’s smoke…you know there’s fire. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently sold a combined 30,000 shares of stock in Alphabet, Google’s parent company. She made this move within a month of the Justice Department opening an antitrust lawsuit against the technology giant. 

According to a federal regulators complaint, Google monopolizes the tools that are essential for website publishers to sell advertisements and also what they need to purchase advertisements. 

So Pelosi, still in Congress, sold some stock on December 21, and more on December 28. The total value of the transactions was between $1.5 million and $3 million. 

And then the disclosures were digitally signed by the lawmaker on January 12.

Now that the antitrust lawsuit has been made public, the company’s stock price has plummeted 6% just this week. You don’t need a search engine to see that something is fishy about all this. 

Federal officials believe that Google has engaged in a “pattern of acquisitions to obtain control over key digital advertising tools” and has manipulated auctions to “deprive rivals of scale.” 

This violates the Sherman Act with outlaws “monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize” in ways the court sees as unreasonable. 

This is not the first time that Nancy and her husband Paul Pelosi have been accused of leveraging insider knowledge to increase earnings in the stock market. 

This is exactly why Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) recently introduced the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act, also known as the PELOSI Act.

You’ve gotta love that title!

He is hitting this head in hopes that lawmakers will not be able to use insider information to personally benefit from it. 

“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,” Hawley said in a statement.