No Wonder U.S. Rep.Chellie Pingree, D-Secret-InsideTrader, Skipped The State Of The Union

When President Trump got Democrats applauding for a proposal to prohibit federal lawmakers from buying and selling stock, one member of that party was conspicuously missing from the State of the Union address.

Chellie Pingree of Maine.

Pingree, the alleged congresswoman from Maine’s southern, most-liberal district, boycotted the speech Tuesday and perhaps now we know why.

Trump urged lawmakers to “pass the stop-insider-trading act without delay.”

Leading Democrats even stood and applauded, including senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Chris Coons of Delaware.

But Pingree was missing, attending her own “state of the union” celebration.

Maybe she was also checking her stock portfolio.

The legislation Trump was urging lawmakers to adopt would ban members of Congress from playing the market.

A bipartisan bill introduced six months ago would ban lawmakers from trading individual stocks.

For more than a decade, a series of bills have been proposed to address such trades, but differences about the details and a lack of support from top congressional leaders stalled past reform efforts.

Among the congressional members whose stock trades triggered the bipartisan effort to put a halt to them is Chellie Pingree.

Pingree’s name is among dozens of stock-trading members of Congress listed on UnusualWhales.com.

Her most recent trade was on October 20, when she sold between $15,000 and $50,000 of U.S. Treasury notes due last month, records reviewed by The Maine Wire show.

The records indicate 22 trades daring back five years, involving U.S. Treasury notes, stocks and municipal securities.

Ironically, Pingree was caught in June failing to report some of her trades, as reported then by The Maine Wire.

Pingree was nabbed secretly buying 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.”

At the same time she was calling for better enforcement of the STOCK Act requiring such reporting.

Pingree claimed her lack of reporting then was an oversight.

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 showed Pingree made six purchases of treasury securities worth between $90,000 and $300,000, and didn’t disclose those purchases.

Pingree says she has supported bills to ban and limit members of Congress from trading stocks in the past and “will again during this Congress.”

“This Congress” ends its term in December, which is ten months from now.

Where was Chellie on Tuesday when Trump was getting cheered even by Democrats in the U.S. House chamber?

Attending a rally on the National Mall in Washington that was called People’s State of the Union to counter what she called “President Trump’s night full of lies and misplaced priorities for the American people.”

The woman who accuses the president of lying to the American people is the same person who “inadvertently” broke the law requiring that she report her stock trades.