Insider has done an amazing job over the past couple of years of profiling
the financial improprieties of members of Congress.
Where they refused to abide by even the very limited disclosure requirements for
their investments.
Maybe hiding nothing, maybe higher hiding shady activity or even illegal activity.
Well, they've identified many of them.
We've had Dave Leventhal and
other members of Insiders team on talk about a lot of different people.
There are 63 members of Congress who have violated the stock act in particular.
Well, we wanna focus today on Representative Madison Cawthorn who has
apparently violated a conflict of interest law by failing to disclose purchases and
sales of six different types of cryptocurrency.
According to a new financial disclosure, we're gonna give you the details.
And then there's an extra twist on this that nobody seems to be focusing on.
But that I think is super suspicious.
So we're gonna turn to that in a minute.
He apparently disclosed crypto trades between $290,000 and $150,000.
Okay, these took place between January and March.
Now, according to the stop act, members of Congress have to report financial
transactions of more than $1000 inside of 45 days.
But Cawthorn waited almost six months after he bought and sold currency
like the let's go Brandon coin and you can see the value of his crypto trades here.
They're all in ranges as all of this is,
it's one of the things they've set up to hide what they're actually doing.
But so you can see he had up to potentially $50,000 of let's go
Brandon coin.
A theory and he had closed up to 215,000 Solana up 295,000.
Bitcoin up to 180,000.
Now if they're gonna look into this and if they found that he violated it.
Hiding all of this for months and months and months, he could be in real trouble.
He could receive a fine of $200.
Assuming that the House Committee on Ethics doesn't wave it,
which they usually do.
So look Brandon I do Jordan I'm talking about Brandon coin.
Sorry we just mentioned the Brandon coin, [LAUGH] let's go Jordan.
So Jordan's I don't know if he did anything shady or not.
I don't know because there's so little disclosure even required.
He didn't even abide by that and he's gonna be totally fine.
It's so messed up.
Yeah and this really highlights the ineffectiveness and
toothless ness of the stock act.
If you can do whatever you want and you just pay $200 penalty.
That's just an invitation to do whatever you want.
But just if you're trading in that kinda quantity,
you can afford a $200 processing fee basically.
>> [LAUGH].
>> You're right, yeah.
>> It's a convenient, yeah.
>> I can't believe it.
>> But look in this case the fact that he's apparently not gonna be
a representative for much longer.
That makes me a little bit less troubled by it.
The fact that they can purchase individual stocks in the first place I think is far
more core of an issue.
But if all we're gonna have to the stock act.
They should at least there should be penalties when you don't abide by it.
Significant ones if any time that one of these financial
penalties is 0.1% of what you make from it.
Again that's all it is a transaction fee and it's not just a representatives.
People like Elon Musk, he's breaking laws left and right but it doesn't matter.
It's just it's factored into the price of doing business.
But I wanna turn now before we move on to another topic to what I think of as
a more core concern.
So my concern isn't necessarily that Madison Cawthorne hid for months.
All these Bitcoin transactions.
My concern and I would love to have like a Ken Klopfenstein look into this.
Is how the hell did the youngest member of Congress
ever potentially trade nearly a million dollars in Cryptocurrency.
Does anyone have an answer to that?
I looked into it as much as I could his resume going into his congressional run.
He'd worked at Chick fil A fully he was a part time worker at a congressional
office.
He did a single semester of college and
they reference to fledgling work as a real estate investor.
So I thought okay well maybe that's what it is.
Maybe the real estate thing?
No well he was the owner and
CEO of SPQR holdings that's a real estate investment firm.
Was started in august 1920 19.
It reported no income.
He is its only employee.
And apparently as of August 2020 it had been involved in only one real estate
transaction, A $20,000 transaction, a foreclosure auction.
How did he get hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of Cryptocurrency?
Maybe it's as simple as his family is wealthy and
it was handed to and plenty of people are just handed vast quantities of wealth.
But he's like 27 or something.
How could he I honestly maybe there's something that I'm missing here.
But nobody is acting as if it's not weird that a guy
who just launched into a congressional run with no prior political
experience is suddenly sitting on maybe $1 million dollars in Cryptocurrency.
What do you think a couple of different things.
I think the initial investment money probably came from all the money he's
made in speaking fees.
That's how a lot of these people make money.
Maybe so he's done a ton of turning point events so they probably.
And that's just just basically a way for big corporate interests and
special interests to navigate around campaign finance laws.
It's like we're gonna do it to them who's gonna pay you to speak at the event.
And there's just no real way to that lead to stop that turning point.
Grassroots, just billionaires give them money and
then they give it to republican politicians, yeah.
Individual capacity.
They don't go as an actual they can say their title, but they do it.
It's such a joke.
But I see it all the time in my own work.
It's we're talking to a member of Congress and
they're just I'm on the unofficial side.
And that's all they just say it and then you just, that's it.
You tagged their personal account you deal with one person who's in their personal
capacity side who also just happens to work in the office,
just use a different phone, a different email.
It's such a joke and they just, that's how they do it.
So a lot of money probably came from that, but
also he boosted the price of like the let's go Brandon coin and
if you especially that one, he boosted it and then sold it.
So he probably quadrupled whatever his return, yeah.
I would love to have known how he got in the original.
Maybe it was speaking fees by the way, if you're conservative watching this.
You might have been excited at one point about the let's go Brandon coin.
He certainly was because he had a scheme in mind.
They were gonna pump up the price of it and then sell it off to like rube
conservatives and then the value absolutely plummeted.
He made a bunch of money.
Where did that money come from?
But that money came from, you actually came from you,
conservatives who trusted people like Madison Cawthorn.
When are you gonna stop doing that?
This is just a money transfer scheme where you give your money to people like
Donald Trump and Madison Cawthorne, you end up with nothing.
I didn't lose any money on that, I didn't buy any let's go brand coin.
That's all on you guys, you conservatives anyway, you might be right.
Maybe it's just a speaking fees that should 100% be illegal.
How could that? That's the most see through
corruption imaginable, yeah.