Here Are the Members of Congress Who Made the Most in Stock Trading in 2023

Congress killed it in the stock market once again, with Democrats outdoing their Republican colleagues by far, despite conflicts in some of their committee appointments, according to a new report by Unusual Whales, a market analysis group.

Some of those high-flying lawmakers included Democratic Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Brian Higgins and Republican Representatives Mark Green and Garret Graves. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConell, Senator Tommy Tuberville, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also make an appearance in the list of top officials who made bank in the stock market last year.

The Unusual Whales analysis is based on financial disclosures made by members of Congress every time they or their families make a trade. Higgins’s gains far outpaced the others’, with 238.9 percent returns over 2023, nearly 10 times the S&P 500 index, which rose 24.8 percent by the end of the year. The data also found Democratic members of Congress secured a 31 percent gain in returns, far outpacing Republicans’ 18 percent gain.

Some of those boons were thanks to unusually timed trades, according to the popular watchdog account, begging the question: How are our politicians making such informed choices?

Technically, it’s illegal for lawmakers to buy and sell stock based on non-public information. In 2012, President Barack Obama signed the STOCK Act, preventing members of Congress from trading based on details obtained through their work, like committee work or entertaining lobbyists.

But as long as a trade is reported in 45 days, U.S. legislators are free to trade however they want, even if the bills they pass or reject could influence a company’s performance and help them line their own pockets.

For example, several lawmakers sitting on the House and Senate committees that regulate the financial industry sold Silicon Valley Bank stock before it crashed.

“One thing people always say is that members are very good at picking stocks, that’s often assumed … but to be quite frank, members were also quite good at avoiding losses,” the founder of Unusual Whales told ABC News in an anonymous interview last year.

Some of the biggest purchases included members on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee scooping up health care stocks in 435 separate transactions, buying financial services stocks in 328 separate transactions, and technology stocks in 272 separate transactions. The House Armed Services Committee saw similar conflicts, with members scooping up health care stocks in 392 separate transactions and financial services stocks in 277 separate transactions, according to data from Unusual Whales.

Representatives Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, and Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, had the most eyebrow-raising activity. Khanna, who sits on the House Armed Services and House Oversight and Accountability committees, had 1,589 separate purchases in health care, financial services, technology, consumer cyclical, industrials, consumer defensive and real estate in his portfolio, while selling nearly $26 million worth of other stocks. McCaul, meanwhile, purchased tech stocks in 142 separate transactions while sitting on the House Foreign Affairs and House Homeland Security committees. He also sold $10.4 million in technology stocks, $9.5 million in communication services, $9.2 million in financial services, $6.6 million in consumer cyclical, and $6.4 million in health care stocks.

This article has been updated.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly wants former Donald Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz to represent Israel at the upcoming hearing at the Hague about the war in Gaza.

South Africa asked the International Court of Justice on December 29 for an urgent order declaring Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in its unrelenting bombardment of the Gaza Strip. The ICJ will hear the case, which Israel has denounced as “baseless,” next week.

As a defendant, Israel is entitled to pick one judge to the 15-member court—and Netanyahu wants that person to be Dershowitz, Axios journalist Barak Ravid reported Tuesday. When Ravid contacted Dershowitz for confirmation, the former Trump attorney said he “can’t comment about it at this time.”

Dershowitz would be a highly fitting representative, though. A longtime friend and advisor of Netanyahu, Dershowitz has defended Israeli settlements, downplayed the horrors of civilian casualties, and attacked liberal Jewish groups.

He has also helped defend Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Donald Trump.

Dershowitz repeatedly defended Trump during the former president’s time in office. Dershowitz backed Trump’s controversial ban on travelers from predominantly Muslim countries. Dershowitz argued that the ban was actually constitutional and didn’t really target Muslims, even though then–Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani admitted the order came about after Trump asked him how to do a Muslim ban “legally.”

Dershowitz also literally defended Trump, acting as his lawyer during the former president’s first impeachment trial, over charges that he tried to use Ukrainian assistance to help him get reelected. During the trial, Dershowitz argued that in using foreign policy to pursue his personal interests, Trump was actually upholding national interests. This monarchic approach to governing is likely appealing to Netanyahu, who has sought to increase his power in Israel’s government.

Dershowitz has also claimed that Islamophobia does not exist on college campuses. In the wake of rising Islamophobia and antisemitism, the result of the Israel-Gaza conflict, Dershowitz said in November, “Oh, we have to fight antisemitism and Islamophobia.”

“Let me tell you who the antisemites are,” he then continued. “They are largely, not completely, the radical Muslims who claim to be victims of Islamophobia. This is a one-sided issue.”

“There is no Islamophobia at any university in the United States. It’s a fake. It’s virtue parading.”

More than 22,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s nearly three-month-long assault on the Gaza Strip. The majority of the victims are women and children. Some organizations, such as the nonprofit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, put the death toll at nearly 30,000.

Despite endless speeches and public statements with claims of rampant voter fraud, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani and the rest of their crew knew ages ago that those allegations were baseless. So says the guy they hired to dig up dirt on 2020 election fraud, anyway.

“I am the expert who was hired by the Trump campaign,” wrote data specialist Ken Block in a USA Today editorial published Tuesday.

Block’s findings were used in the January 6 select committee’s investigation and were subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith and for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s Georgia investigation.

“Those emails and documents show that the voter data available to the campaign contained no evidence of large-scale voter fraud based on data mining and fraud analytics,” wrote Block. “More important, claims of voter fraud made by others were verified as false, including proof of why those claims were disproven.”

Although the Trump contract included mandates necessitating the discovery of wide-scale voter fraud, Block said the only indication of fraud he found was “bipartisan,” with as many Republicans casting duplicate votes as Democrats.

According to the Simpatico Software Systems owner, the number of deceased voters in the voting pool across the country was minimal and failed to meet the threshold for legal challenges to the election results in any state.

“If voter fraud had impacted the 2020 election, it would already have been proven. Maintaining the lies undermines faith in the foundation of our democracy,” Block wrote.

Time would be better spent reinforcing national electoral systems to strengthen election security by November 2024, according to Block, who noted that practices like gerrymandering are destructive to American democracy. But the opposite has actually been on the Republican agenda.

As another example, not mentioned by Block, Trump and his allies have worked to discredit an electoral voter-roll tool known as the Electronic Registration Information Center—or ERIC—in a potential bid to sow more chaos in the wake of the 2024 election than they did in 2020.

So far, Trump has claimed he would make the system illegal, despite its function of providing election officials with reports on potential inaccuracies in voter lists and identifying people who are registered to vote in more than one state. That’s led to a number of states departing the nonpartisan program, which in itself is a bit of a software engineering marvel, running on the work of just three employees with zero philanthropic funding.

Louisiana led the bunch, removing itself from ERIC in 2022. Since then, Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia have done so too—dropping its membership to 25 states plus Washington, D.C.—though more resignations are anticipated, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Donald Trump has adopted a new strategy for the Republican primary: Instead of assuming he can coast to the nomination, he’s going after Nikki Haley.

In the past few weeks, Trump-allied super PAC MAGA Inc. has spent nearly $3.5 million in anti-Haley advertising, according to a report from The Daily Beast. The bulk of that money went to an ad buy, running a commercial accusing Haley of flip-flopping on support for a gas tax while she was governor of South Carolina. But several hundred thousand dollars also went to anti-Haley mailers and text messages.

Despite being more than six months into primary campaigning, this is still one of the first times that Trump’s team has targeted a specific candidate instead of lashing out at the rest of the Republican field in general. Trump ran a few ads early on slamming Ron DeSantis, once touted as Trump’s natural successor, but spent far less in comparison.

DeSantis’s campaign failed spectacularly to gain steam, while Haley has seen a recent jump in the polls. RealClearPolitics’s rolling average of the last three weeks of polling currently has Haley tied with DeSantis for second place, although Trump still enjoys a hefty lead.

Trump’s decision to attack Haley could backfire by revealing she’s the opponent who scares him most. Giving her such a spotlight could actually consolidate the conservative anti-Trump vote behind her. Haley herself is taking the ad campaign as a win.

“Two days ago, Donald Trump denied our surge in New Hampshire existed. Now, he’s running a negative ad against me,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter) when the ad first ran in mid-December. “Someone’s getting nervous.”

Haley has also pushed back against the premise of the ad. The ad claims that as governor, Haley reneged on a promise not to raise South Carolina’s gas tax. That allegation has been widely debunked as misleading: In reality, Haley had suggested raising the gas tax while simultaneously cutting the income tax. The bill did not pass.

“Everyone from Joe Biden to Donald Trump is attacking Nikki for one reason: She’s the only candidate with momentum,” a senior Haley adviser told The Daily Beast, speaking anonymously.

Unfortunately, Haley isn’t doing herself any favors by generally refusing to go after Trump in the same way. She ended 2023 by refusing to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, which fellow Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie ascribed to her being afraid of alienating Trump supporters.

Haley then said she would pardon Trump if he is convicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election. This isn’t the first time she has said she would let her former boss off the hook.

Stuart Stevens, the lead strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said he doesn’t think Haley is ready to go head-to-head with Trump. He described her as a “bundle of ambition with no particular purpose.”

For instance, Stevens told The Daily Beast that Haley undermined any claims that her campaign is about upholding the U.S. Constitution because she said she’d pardon Trump, “someone who tried to subvert the constitution.”

“It’s just a very confused candidacy,” Stevens said. “She’s running because she would really like to be president. That’s OK, but it’s not a particularly compelling reason for anyone else to vote for her.”

GOP loyalty to Donald Trump is morphing into total blinders to the former president’s violent politics.

A new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll illustrates that Republicans are now, more than ever, more likely to believe baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from their front-runner, that January 6 rioters were not violent, and that the insurrection was instigated by law enforcement. The results are the latest follow-up to another round of GOP interviews conducted by The Washington Post in December 2021.

“From a historical perspective, these results would be chilling to many analysts,” Michael J. Hanmer, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, told the Post.

Americans of every political demographic seemingly have more doubts about President Joe Biden’s legitimate ascent to the White House. According to the poll, just 62 percent of Americans, including Democrats and independents, believe the 2020 election was legitimate—down from 69 percent in 2021. Republican belief dropped the most, though, falling by eight points in the last three years to just 31 percent in the most recent survey.

“There were so many people that felt the election was rigged. It was not right for them to break in like that, but they were fed up and frustrated and they were whipped into a frenzy by the FBI and others,” said Colleen Michaels, 59, of Woodsfield, Ohio, who told the Post that she would have attended Trump’s protest at the U.S. Capitol herself if not for a medical emergency.

In defending their turned perspectives, interviewed Republicans cited debunked claims of voter fraud in Georgia, pointing toward a video of election workers allegedly placing fake ballots into the tally. That same claim, advertised by Rudy Giuliani, recently earned the Trump fixer a $148 million judgment for defamation.

And while the majority of Americans believe that the events of January 6 threatened U.S. democracy, Republicans seem to feel otherwise, differing wildly from their recorded opinions in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

More than seven in 10 Republicans say the attack has been overinflated and feel it is “time to move on,” reported the Post. Republicans seem to believe less and less that the attack was violent, with 18 percent believing the rioters were “mostly violent,” a statistic that has dropped from 26 percent in 2021. That’s compared to 77 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of independents who also reported that the attempted insurrectionists were violent.