Originally published at: Rand Paul's wife bought stock in Covid drugmaker as pandemic struck and they failed to disclose it | Boing Boing
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Rand Paul may not be prosecutable for insider trading, but I would think his wife, who is not an elected official, would be. It would be an interesting legal precedent to adjudicate through the courts. 
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STOCK Act Periodic Disclosure Requirements Amended to Cover Trades by Congressional Spouses and Dependents
On August 16, 2012, President Obama signed into law a brief, hastily passed amendment to the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012 providing that the periodic transaction reports required by the Act must be filed in connection with securities trades by a spouse or dependent child of a Member or covered employee of the U.S. House. This amendment addresses—and reverses—the House Committee on Ethics’ previously issued interpretation of the language of the STOCK Act, as originally enacted, regarding the requirement for covered officials to disclose securities transactions, exceeding $1,000 in value, within 30 to 45 days of the trade date. The House Ethics Committee had previously advised that this reporting requirement applied only to trades by a Member or covered House employee him or herself and not to trades by a spouse or dependent child.
“The STOCK Act – which was enacted in 2012 to outlaw congressional insider trading, or the use of nonpublic information for one’s financial benefit – requires trade disclosures within 45 days. Paul’s reporting came 16 months late.” -CNN
Bad Libertarian. Bad!
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This is the kind of stuff libertarians are supposedly against.
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How could any GOP death cultist resist the opportunity for a simultaneous tribute to Mammon and Moloch?
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Which is why you also shouldn’t hold your breath on their following the supposed Libertarian principle of “personal responsibility” now that they’ve been caught.
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The Libertarian rag, The Washington Examiner, not surprisingly has no mention of the revelation.
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I’m sure the same goes for Faux and the other Murdoch outlets.
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Oh how I’d love to see Rancid Pol go down for this.
But yeah, a day when a Washington politician gets even more rich by being a Washington politician, and faces no consequences for that, is just another day ending with a y.
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As much as I hate Rand Paul and love his neighbor who famously beat him up, as reported this seems like extremely small potatoes.
Gilead was at $63.20 in Jan 2020 (it had already gone up in Feb), and peaked at $84 in April. $15,000, without fees/etc would have AT BEST turned into less than $20,000, net gain of < $5000. Even if they were just bad at insider trading, it seems like very small potatoes, and the fact that the price of Gilead was already rising seems to indicate that it didn’t really need to be very insider at all.
The most puzzling part to me is why a wealthy senator is doing relatively small, individually directed investments in minor stocks at all.
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The transaction itself is small potatoes; Paul however appears to be in violation of the STOCK act. Which is the kind of thing we should take seriously for all Senators.
To be fair, it wouldn’t surprise me if he just forgot (or his wife forgot about the transaction). It would be exactly the sort of half-assedness we’ve come to expect from America’s Douchiest Senator.
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Quite obviously because he believed he would make a profit off those particular investments. Which is the point of this scandal whether or not he made as much money as he likely hoped.
Look at it this way: if Paul was willing to compromise himself over “small potatoes” then how badly would he be willing to screw over his country and his constituents if the stakes were higher?
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Say it ain’t so Rand, you opportunistic piece of shit.
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Stating my agreement with others here about Paul’s violation of the law and his petty greed, I’ll just point out that an extra $5000 or even an extra $1000 in the bank could be a life-changing amount of money for a lot of his constituents (including the suckers who keep voting for him).
I don’t think so. This was a very specific stock pick done at a very specific time. It’s hard to forget that kind of trade unless one is doing so willfully.
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In my experience working at a public access TV station with multiple Libertarian TV shows, there was one common thread that was consistent with all the Libertarians I had to deal with.
They once tried to do something, only to find out it was against the law. Then they use that one instance as the basis to b*tch about how there are too many laws and that’s why they are now a Libertarian. Bonus points if they are still bitching about it 20 years later. I swear 50% of the public access TV Libertarians I knew got their start by being incredulous that the city was allowed to tell them how many chickens they could have in their backyard. The runner up reason seemed to be that they were trying out some creative accounting and ran afoul of an obscure banking regulation.
I’m not counting all the “Libertarians” that have never voted anything but a straight Republican ticket and say that they are “independent but lean Libertarian.” Those seem to be people that have bought into the worst of conservative Republican thought and think that they can hide behind the “Libertarian” label when they get into political conversations. In creative fields this is also the person who says “I don’t believe that (movies/heavy metal/rock music) should be political.”
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$$$$>Lives
It’s really an easy formula.
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This sounds like a job for CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE.
Take their fucking money. They committed crimes.
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To be fair, his wife prolly just bought Gilead because she’s a fan of The Handmaid’s Tale.
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Isn’t it the opposite? Should he be able to do “anything”? So, he’s against the law that makes him have to report his stock transactions. But the transactions themselves, oh, that’s just fine. Let the market (in this case, the electorate) decide whether or not he belongs in office.
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The point of the scandal is that he was profiting off of non-public knowledge about the pandemic and/or Gilead, not that he was trying to make a profit.
It’s hard to say that it’s really “insider” when the price was already rising pretty quickly. WHO had already declared it a global emergency on January 31, and the CDC had already had the first US case 10 days previous. As sham-y as his medical degree is, it’s quite possible they could have read between the lines, and it might explain why it was such a minor investment for them, because it was taking a risk on not much public info.
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