Okay, Trump didn't come into the world as a penniless orphan, got me there. How many years has Pelosi spent building a business empire in the private sector? Employing people? Huge construction projects? No.
Pelosi was singled out in the so-called “Pelosi Provision” that sought to end special Congressional access to IPOs as part of the broader STOCK act legislation. Pelosi and her husband, who owns the investment firm Financial Leasing Services, were outed in a 2011 “60 Minutes” expose for making a fortune on VISA IPO shares by delaying legislation that Visa lobbied against. Not only was she never prosecuted, fined or ousted, the Pelosis continue to be active traders in the stock market, now heavily invested in tech stocks.
One of Pelosi’s senior aides was likewise singled out in a 2017 Politico investigation into the alarming problems of staff insider trading. Only staff earning more than roughly $125,000 have to disclose their finances, which translates to only 13 percent of the 12,500 staffers. But as the Politico report points out, “[A]ides often have more of a hands-on role than the members themselves in crafting details of legislation that could have enormous consequences for individual companies.”
These people write the laws and they STILL trade in the industries they oversee. For many of them, insider trading was and is the primary source of their fortunes. I will hold Trump's record up against Congressional conflicted trading any day.
