The STOCK Act passed in 2012. Here are the most notorious trading scandals that followed.

The STOCK Act of 2012 was a direct response to a wave of academic research and investigative reporting showing that members of Congress consistently outperformed the market in ways that tracked legislative developments in their committees. The law clarified that members of Congress are subject to the same insider trading prohibition that applies to everyone else, and it added a new requirement: all trades above $1,000 must be publicly disclosed within 45 days.

What it did not do is ban congressional stock ownership. It did not require pre-clearance before trades are made. It did not remove members from committees when their holdings created direct conflicts. It did not create an independent enforcement body. The fine for a disclosure violation was set at $200, and the House and Senate Ethics committees were left in charge of enforcing it against their own members. The gaps in that structure have defined every significant case since.

The cases below are not hypothetical conflicts of interest. They are documented instances with specific dates, specific trades, and specific pieces of non-public information that preceded them. In only one case did it result in a prison sentence. In several others, the Department of Justice opened full criminal investigations, seized devices, and issued sworn affidavits documenting probable cause, then closed the cases with no charges filed. The pattern across all five cases is more instructive than any of them individually.

On the evening of June 22, 2017, Representative Chris Collins of New York was attending the annual Congressional Picnic on the White House South Lawn when his phone received an email from the CEO of Innate Immunotherapeutics. The message contained information that would have been worth millions in any market: MIS416, the company's multiple sclerosis drug in clinical trial, had failed. The trial results were catastrophic. The stock would crater when the public found out.

Collins sat on the company's board of directors and held a substantial personal stake. He had helped introduce the company to other members of Congress as an investment opportunity. He was one of its largest shareholders. He knew exactly what the failed trial meant.

He did not sell his own shares that night. He called his son.

At 7:11 p.m., Collins tried to reach Cameron Collins twice. Cameron didn't pick up. At 7:16 p.m., they connected. The call lasted six minutes and eight seconds. Prosecutors later documented every second. The following morning, Cameron Collins began selling. Between June 23 and June 26, he unloaded approximately 1,391,500 shares of Innate Immunotherapeutics. He avoided roughly $570,900 in losses. He also tipped at least three other parties, who collectively avoided another $186,620 by selling before the announcement hit.

When Innate publicly disclosed the failed trial, the stock dropped 92 percent in a single session. Anyone who hadn't sold was devastated.

Collins was indicted in August 2018. He initially denied everything, called the charges "meritless," and ran for re-election anyway. He won. In October 2019, with the evidence against him overwhelming, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and making false statements to the FBI. On January 17, 2020, he was sentenced to 26 months in federal prison. On January 19, 2021, his last full day in office, Donald Trump pardoned Collins.

Collins remains the only member of Congress convicted and sentenced to prison for insider trading in the post-STOCK Act era. Critically, his prosecution was brought under general federal securities fraud statutes, not the STOCK Act itself. The STOCK Act has never been used as the basis for a criminal prosecution.

Richard Burr was not a peripheral figure in the Senate's COVID-19 response. He was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Throughout January and into early February 2020, while the White House was publicly dismissing the threat, the Intelligence Committee was receiving classified briefings with a very different picture. The briefings warned of a potentially severe global pandemic with significant economic consequences. Burr attended those briefings. He also gave a private speech to a group of constituents in mid-January 2020 describing the coming outbreak in stark terms that contradicted everything the administration was saying publicly, according to a recording later obtained by NPR.

On February 13, 2020, Senator Burr's accounts executed 33 individual stock trades, selling between $628,000 and $1.72 million worth of holdings in a single day. ProPublica later reported the total at approximately $1.65 million. The stocks sold included significant positions in hospitality companies (hotels and lodging chains that would be among the hardest hit by travel shutdowns and lockdown orders). One week later, on February 20, 2020, U.S. markets began their fastest collapse since the Great Depression.

When the trades were reported, Burr's explanation was that he had acted on public information, specifically a CNBC report about coronavirus risks. The problem with that explanation was the timing: 33 trades concentrated in a single day, weighted toward precisely the sectors that classified briefings identified as most vulnerable, executed a week before a 34% market decline in 33 days.

On May 13, 2020, federal agents from the FBI arrived at Burr's home and seized his personal cell phone. The following day, he stepped down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The FBI obtained a warrant for his phone on the basis that there was probable cause to believe he had committed insider trading and securities fraud. That language is from the sworn affidavit of an FBI special agent, unsealed in 2022.

The Justice Department closed its criminal investigation into Burr in January 2021. The SEC continued its civil probe. In January 2023, Burr's attorneys announced the SEC had also closed its investigation with no action. Burr said he was glad the matter was "in the rearview mirror." He did not seek re-election and left the Senate in January 2023.

The probable cause that justified seizing a sitting senator's phone was never tested in court. No charges were filed. Under the STOCK Act, the maximum civil penalty for the disclosure portion of his filings would have been $200.

The trades belong to Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband. That distinction matters legally, since spouses are not prohibited from trading under the STOCK Act, even when their partner is the most powerful member of the House of Representatives. It matters less analytically, because the two share a household, a financial life, and a common knowledge of what legislation is moving and when.

In June 2021, Paul Pelosi purchased 50 call options on NVIDIA Corporation, with a strike price of $400 and an expiration roughly a year out. The disclosure, filed July 2, 2021, placed the total value between $1 million and $5 million. At the time of purchase, NVIDIA was trading at roughly $170 per share on a split-adjusted basis. The options were a leveraged bet that NVIDIA would rise substantially.

Over the following twelve months, as the options aged, the legislation that would directly benefit NVIDIA moved steadily toward passage. The CHIPS and Science Act, a $52.7 billion federal subsidy for domestic semiconductor manufacturing, had Nancy Pelosi's full political support. As Speaker, she controlled what came to the House floor. When Senate passage of the bill looked uncertain in the spring of 2022, she publicly committed to scheduling a House vote regardless. The bill's direct beneficiaries were exactly the companies Paul had bet on with those options: U.S. chip designers and manufacturers, with NVIDIA as the most prominent.

On June 17, 2022, Paul Pelosi exercised the options, acquiring 25,000 shares of NVIDIA. In late July 2022, as the CHIPS Act neared its final Senate vote (it passed on July 27), the Pelosis disclosed the sale of those 25,000 shares at an average price of approximately $165 per share, reporting a loss of $341,365 on the specific sale transaction.

That reported loss became the primary defense against the optics. Critics noted the complexity behind it: options are exercised based on strike price, not current market price, and the mechanics of the June exercise and subsequent July sale meant the accounting treatment of "loss" was a function of how the transaction was structured rather than a straightforward indication that the trade was unprofitable over its lifetime. Had the options been held rather than exercised and immediately sold into a declining market, the outcome would have looked different.

No investigation was opened. The STOCK Act does not cover spouses. Nancy Pelosi has described the trades as entirely her husband's decisions, made without her input. The episode accelerated the momentum for a congressional stock trading ban, and is almost certainly why you know Nancy Pelosi's name when it comes to stock trading, even though it is her husband who placed the trades. The full story of why Pelosi trades attract so much attention is more nuanced than any single transaction.

In September 2025, the fate of TikTok's U.S. operations was moving toward resolution inside the Trump White House. The broad contours (a forced divestiture from Chinese parent ByteDance, a new U.S.-controlled ownership structure, a technology partner to oversee the algorithm) were being negotiated at the executive level. The specific companies that would benefit from that structure were not yet public.

On September 17 and 18, 2025, Representative Cleo Fields of Louisiana's 6th Congressional District purchased between $80,000 and $200,000 worth of Oracle Corporation stock across two separate transactions. Fields sits on the House Financial Services Committee's Subcommittee on Capital Markets, which has oversight jurisdiction over the securities and financial markets involved in major corporate restructurings, including transactions of the type being negotiated for TikTok.

On September 22, news broke publicly that Oracle had been selected to play a central role in the TikTok deal, specifically overseeing the platform's algorithm and U.S. data operations. Oracle's involvement would be formalized by executive order and represented a significant new government-adjacent revenue stream for the company.

On September 23, one day after that news broke, Fields purchased additional Oracle stock.

On September 25, President Trump signed the executive order confirming Oracle's role. Oracle's stock moved on the news.

When the trade disclosures surfaced and were reported by NOTUS, Fields denied any inside knowledge. "There's not a single stock that I've purchased because I had some inside information," he told reporters. He noted that he reports all trades within 30 days, ahead of the 45-day STOCK Act requirement. No formal investigation has been announced.

The case is structurally similar to Burr's in one important way: what is documented is the timing relative to non-public information, not a specific piece of evidence proving knowledge transferred. Under current law, that gap between suspicious timing and provable intent is exactly where most cases die. The additional purchase on September 23, after partial public disclosure of Oracle's role, adds a layer of complexity: by that date, some of the relevant information was no longer fully non-public.

Rob Bresnahan is a freshman Republican congressman from northeastern Pennsylvania, elected in 2024. Before entering politics, he was a construction industry executive. During his campaign, he signed a public letter calling for a ban on congressional stock trading. He ran, in part, on the idea that members of Congress should not be permitted to trade individual stocks while writing the laws that govern the industries they invest in.

On May 6, 2025, Bresnahan introduced legislation in the House to do exactly that: prohibit members of Congress from trading individual stocks. He issued a public statement about it and announced he was in the process of moving his portfolio into a blind trust.

Nine days later, on May 15, 2025, while the blind trust was still being established, his financial accounts sold up to $130,000 in stock across four companies: Centene, Elevance Health, UnitedHealth Group, and CVS Health. These are not random healthcare names. Together, those four companies manage the Medicaid coverage of nearly half of all Medicaid enrollees in the United States. Their revenues are almost entirely dependent on the Medicaid funding levels that Congress sets.

Seven days after the sales, on May 22, the House voted on the first procedural step for President Trump's reconciliation bill, which would come to be known as the "One Big Beautiful Bill". The bill contained nearly one trillion dollars in Medicaid cuts, the largest reduction to the program in its history. Bresnahan voted yes, along with all but two House Republicans. The bill ultimately passed both chambers and was signed into law.

Centene's stock, which Bresnahan had sold, dropped 43 percent in the months following the vote as the market priced in the Medicaid revenue loss.

Bresnahan's statement to NBC News: "I never instructed my financial advisors on what to buy, sell, or hold." His office noted the timing was coincidental with the blind trust transition. Former Republican Representative James Greenwood publicly called on Bresnahan to resign. Political ads ran against him in Pennsylvania. No federal investigation was announced.

The sequence is difficult to explain away not because of any single element, but because of the combination: a public reformer pledge, a stock-trading-ban bill introduced nine days prior, a sale targeting exactly the companies that would be most damaged by the legislation he was about to vote for, a vote to pass that legislation, and a 43% decline in those stocks afterward. The legal standard required for prosecution still demands proof that a specific piece of material non-public information directly caused the trade. None of the public record definitively establishes that. Under current law, it is not enough.

Read individually, each case has its own particulars. Read together, they describe a system. Several structural observations apply across all five: