If you’re going to get caught breaking a law that you claim to support, make sure the news breaks going into Father’s Day/”No Kings” weekend so hopefully no one notices.
Pick your best analogy for explaining how Maine’s liberal southern-district congresswoman got corraled violating the measure that she’s been railing needs better enforcement.
Hand in the cookie jar?
Practice what you preach?
Rules for thee, but not for me?
U.S. Democrat Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) quickly blamed her violation of the “STOCK Act” on – you guessed it – a “reporting error.”
Hubris personified is a way to more aptly describe it.
Pingree was nabbed failing to disclose the purchase of several U.S. Treasury Notes – three months after the deadline set by the “STOCK” law.
STOCK is the acronym for “Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge.”
Oopsie daisy.
“Sorry, officer, I didn’t see the STOCK sign.”
The law, enacted in 2012, aims to prohibit members of Congress from making use of information gained through their official position for their personal financial benefit.
The act requires all members of Congress to publicly disclose any financial transactions within 45 days.
The federal document shows Pingree made six purchases of treasury securities worth between $90,000 and $300,000, and didn’t disclose those purchases.
After all, the sum involved was just a pittance for someone who receives a million dollars a year in an annuity on top of her congressional salary and returns from other investments. As such, the annual income of up to several of her constituents was easily overlooked.
Perhaps she was too busy fighting for Maine?
A spokesperson defending Pingree says the Treasury Bond purchases weren’t stocks and “were disclosed late due to a paperwork error.”
So apparently if your violation involves securities and not stocks everything is just fine thank you.
Pingree claims that once she “discovered” the “late-report issue,” she rectified it “immediately” and filed the “necessary paperwork.”
She also paid the $200 “late-filing fee.”
Bless her heart.
Pingree says – and this is really the richest part – she has supported bills to ban and limit members of Congress from trading stocks in the past and “will again during this Congress.”
Chellie likes to play both sides of the street, as we say in the trade.
Even when she does comply with the rules – as she allegedly did when she expanded Nepo Lodge on North Haven which she runs with her daughter — ex-Maine House Speaker and current gubernatorial aspirant Hannah Pingree – it’s still all about Chellie.
To wit, her neighbor – world-renowned math wiz Stephen Wolfram – took every available avenue of appeal seven years ago to stop the expansion, but failed.
So when Minnesota -born Chellie wants what’s good for Chellie, whatever one of her constituents expresses is of no consequence to her.
The other tangential question raised by Chellie’s failure to lawfully report her securities trade is why Maine’s legacy newspaper of record farmed out the story to someone who lists himself as an “investigative journalist” – and who is not on the paper’s regular staff.
The newspaper chain that handed off the story to freelancer Dave Levinthal is the same rag that used to be owned by Chellie’s then-No. 2 now-ex husband, hedge-funder Donnie Sussman.
Levinthal’s byline on the Chellie caper was tagged “Special to the Press Herald.”
Oh-so special.
His tagline describes him as “a Washington, D.C.-based investigative journalist who regularly reports on political money and ethics issues.”
Why the state’s biggest newspaper couldn’t find a staffer to call Chellie to the carpet(bagger) goes largely unexplained.
Kinda like Chellie’s illegal weekend investment debacle.
Maybe the Portland Press Herald should put its newly-unveiled fact police on the case.
