Three Republican members of Congress will face ethics charges for more than $22 million in stock trades for which they had failed to file the required under the STOCK Act for financial transparency, Slate reports.
Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Congressman Pat Fallon of Texas and Congressman Blake Moore of Utah–all first term members of Congress–all freshmen members–failed to report within the required 45 days. Fallon’s case is exceptionally egregious: he dumped $250,000 in Microsoft stock days before it was announced that the company lost the exclusive contract for the $10 billion Pentagon Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing system. Falloon sits on the House Armed Services Committee’s brand new Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems, which oversaw the contract.
“When members of Congress trade individual stocks and fail to disclose those trades, they break the law and diminish the public’s trust in government,” the complaints, filed by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, states. “The recent prevalence of STOCK Act violations in the House shows that merely the threat of a fine is not deterring members of Congress from breaking the law; real accountability is necessary.”