Speaker 1: . Matt Gates isn't the only Republican in trouble, in possible trouble on the Senate
side of the Capitol, Rand Paul, this headline from The Washington Post unsurprising headline,
might I add, Rand Paul disclosed 16 months late that his wife bought stock in company
behind covid treatment.
Listen.
Senators and Congress people.
I don't know that we should exclude them from investments like stock trading, I don't know,
it's tough, I think, to say one way or the other definitively it's a there needs to be
more options on the table and looked at as far as what we should do to curb the kind
of self dealing insider trading benefit from the intelligence that they have.
And I don't mean intelligence like brains.
I mean like intel on the ground.
I mean, they are they are behind the scenes able to know things that are coming down,
especially related to our current health crisis.
Knowing what is happening, getting briefings, top secret and otherwise they're in the know,
and if they use that information to enrich themselves, they're at an advantage and an
advantage that isn't baked into the job.
You don't run for Congress and represent a constituency in order that you become rich.
Rand Paul, Mr. Noble, warrior of truth, Mr. Liberty.
That's not what you're there for, reading from the article.
Senator Rand Paul revealed Wednesday that his wife bought stock in Gilead Sciences,
which makes an antiviral drug used to treat covid-19 on February.
Twenty sixth twenty twenty.
What a coincidence.
What a shocking coincidence that on February twenty six, twenty twenty, they bought the
stock.
And this was before the threat from the coronavirus was fully understood by the public and before
it was classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization.
The disclosure in a filing with the Senate came 16 months after the 45 day reporting
deadline set forth in the STOCK Act, which is designed to combat insider trading.
So there are regulations, there are rules, there are stipulations.
There are there are rules that he has stipulated to that he is bound by a forward after you
trade.
You have forty five days to report it for ethics controls.
And just so the public knows what's going on, and he waited 16 months after the 45 day
limit, experts in corporate and securities law said the investment and especially the
delayed reporting of it undermined trust in government and raised questions about whether
the Kentucky Republican's family had sought to profit from nonpublic information about
the looming health emergency and plans by the US government to combat it.
Several senators sold large amounts of stocks in January or February of last year, prompting
a handful of insider trading probes.
Most of those investigations concluded in the spring of twenty twenty, according to
notifications from the Justice Department to lawmakers under scrutiny.
Remember Kelly Lefler?
BA from North Carolina.
All of this not good.
They are trying to enrich themselves with the knowledge that they have from their elected
office.
Self dealing in the age of Trump seems like anything goes.
The senator ought to have an explanation for the trade and more importantly, why it took
him almost a year and a half to discover it from his wife, said James D. Cox, a professor
of law at Duke University.
Kelsey Cooper, a spokeswoman for Paul, said the senator completed a reporting form for
his wife's investment last year but learned only recently while preparing an annual disclosure
that the form had not been transmitted.
That's a that's a very technical way of saying, oh yeah, we didn't send it.
We didn't email that.
We didn't include that.
It wasn't transmitted.
He sought guidance from the Senate Ethics Committee, she said, and filed the supplemental
report Wednesday, along with the annual disclosure, which was due in May and submitted three months
late.
She also said Paul's wife, Kelly, and author and former communications consultant lost
money on the investment, which she made with her own earnings.
The purchase was of between 1000 and fifteen thousand dollars of stock in AD, which makes
the antiviral drug known as Ramdisk Saphir.
The company's stock was worth seventy four.
Listen to this.
Seriously, listen to this.
This is how they're saying they lost money.
The company's stock was worth seventy four dollars and 70 cents per share on the day
of the purchase and rose above 80 dollars in March.
It has since since, though, now that they're reporting.
Now that they've lost money on it, now they're reporting that they bought it.
It has since fluctuated and was worth sixty nine dollars and 84 cents on the day of Paul's
disclosure more than a year later.
So because they made a bad investment, had they had they had they this stock skyrocketed
and they made all kinds of money, who knows what would have taken place?
Who knows how long we would have had to wait or if we would have ever found out at all
disgusting, unethical, immoral use of his office to enrich himself, he and his wife.
No good, no good.
And it is pattern and practice for Republicans to skirt the rules while screaming from the
rooftops about propriety and morality and family values and truth and justice and the
American way.
Unacceptable, Senator Paul.