(Headline USA) Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., sold 30,000 shares of Google stock just one month before the Justice Department announced an antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant.
Paul Pelosi, who runs a San Francisco-based investment and venture capital firm, sold his shares in Alphabet, Google’s parent company, in three separate transactions between Dec. 20 and Dec. 28, according to Fox Business. The amounts sold ranged between $500,000 and $1 million.
A month later, the DOJ and eight states sued Alphabet, alleging the company has used “anti-competitive, exclusionary, and unlawful conduct to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies.”
“Google’s anticompetitive behavior has raised barriers to entry to artificially high levels, forced key competitors to abandon the market for ad tech tools, dissuaded potential competitors from joining the market, and left Google’s few remaining competitors marginalized and unfairly disadvantaged,” the DOJ and the states alleged.
Paul Pelosi’s trades came to light the same week that Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced a bill to ban congressmembers and their spouses from trading stocks while in office. The bill, named after Pelosi — the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities Act — was inspired by Paul Pelosi’s decision to sell $5 million worth of shares in computer chipmaker Nvidia just days before Congress approved a $280 billion subsidies package for the semiconductor industry.
“When voters send members of Congress to Washington, they expect them to do the people’s business, not to be day trading on the stock market, not to be using the information they get from briefings to go and make a quick buck on Wall Street,” Hawley said.
Nancy Pelosi’s office has repeatedly denied that she had any involvement with her husband’s trading practices, saying the Democrat “does not own any stocks.”
