FLASHBACK: ’60 Minutes’ Exposes How Pelosi Earns Fortune Using Stock Market Manipulation
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is worth up to $160 million
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There are some things the Democrats would prefer to keep hidden from the public, and that's a good reason why they hate President Donald Trump.
The president has pledged to "drain the swamp" since before he was elected and continues to push to expose corruption while the mainstream media refuses to support him.
A few years ago, a huge scandal emerged but the liberal media barely touched the story.
Steve Kroft reported on a little-known loophole that allows members of Congress to legally trade stock based on non-public information from Capitol Hill - and the main star of the exposé was top Democrat Nancy Pelosi.
In 2008, Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, participated in an initial public offering of Visa, according to CBS.
They bought 5,000 shares at the initial price of $44; two days later, shares were trading at $64, CBS said.
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The network reported the investment came at the same time a piece of legislation that was opposed by credit-card companies was making its way through the House.
The bill never saw the light of day which resulted in the share prices rising back up.
In the real world, this type of investing is called insider trading - and is highly illegal - but those laws don't apply to members of Congress.
“Congress has never done more for consumers nor has the Congress passed more critical reforms of the credit card industry than under the Speakership of Nancy Pelosi,” Pelosi spokesman, Drew Hammill, said in a statement few days after the report came out.
CBS said it used as a starting point for its story the research of investigative reporter Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University.
In 2011, he began work on a book about “soft corruption” in Washington D.C., CBS reported.
The network said it had independently verified the material it had used.
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Pelosi’s spokesman criticized the CBS story for failing to note that the “legislation in question was reported out of the Judiciary Committee on October 3, 2008 — the day the House was consumed in passing TARP and also the last day the House was in session before the November election.”
You can watch the preview of the show and the full show below:
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President Trump has frequently pointed to the recent Democratic leadership as some of the most corrupt politicians in America's history.
Schweizer stressed that what Pelosi did was completely legal, however.
“There are all sorts of forms of honest grafts that congressmen engage in that allow them to become very, very wealthy,” he told Kroft.
While Nancy Pelosi refuses to confirm her net worth, estimates place it from as low as $34M and up to $160 million.
"So it's not illegal, but I think it's highly unethical, I think it's highly offensive and wrong,” Schweizer added.
"… Insider trading on the stock market.
"If you are a member of Congress, those laws are deemed not to apply.
“The fact is, if you sit on a healthcare committee and you know that Medicare, for example, is — is considering not reimbursing for a certain drug that's market-moving information.
"And if you can trade stock on — off of that information and do so legally, that's a great profit-making opportunity.
"And that sort of behavior goes on.”
