Perdue is caught once again misleading reporters about his wrongdoing and the scrutiny it received
Ethics expert: “It looks terrible. You’re receiving all kinds of non-public information in your job as a member of Congress and you’re trading all these stocks.”
Atlanta, Ga. — Yesterday, new reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution debunked Sen. David Perdue’s (R-Ga.) claim that he has been “totally exonerated.” For months, Perdue has been running ads claiming he was “cleared,” but when the AJC looked under the hood, they found Perdue was citing an investigative body which has NEVER required disciplinary action for a Senator. The AJC also pointed out that, unlike Sen. Loeffler, Perdue “will not provide a copy of his dismissal letter” and still will not provide a single piece of evidence that he has been “cleared” or “totally exonerated” by the DOJ or SEC as he claims.
The report underscores how Perdue has been lying and misleading reporters for months about this false claim and his claims that he had no personal control of his portfolio, as reported by The New York Times.
The story revealed that the Senate Ethics Committee “almost never finds fault with the 100 members of the U.S. Senate,” pointing to an analysis showing that of the 1,189 complaints of alleged violations from 2007 through 2019, zero resulted in disciplinary action.
Read key highlights from the report below.
- “Under fire over allegations of insider trading and profiting off the pandemic, Georgia U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have responded with a similar refrain.
- The bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee, their campaign ads proclaim, dismissed probes of their stock trades without finding any wrongdoing.
- Those outcomes, however, should be no surprise.
- The committee of three Republican senators and three Democrats almost never finds fault with the 100 members of the U.S. Senate. An analysis of the committee’s publicly available annual reports from 2007 through 2019 shows it received 1,189 complaints of alleged violations. Not one resulted in a disciplinary sanction, records show.
- Most complaints were dismissed without even a preliminary investigation by staff. Only six cases during that period resulted in private or public letters of admonition — effectively a slap on the wrist — for those who ran afoul of the Senate’s rules or standards.
- “A senator saying he or she has been cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee should be taken with a grain of salt,” said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a Washington-based watchdog group that has studied the committee’s work. “The Senate Ethics Committee manages to find ethics violations about as often as an NBA referee manages to call a traveling or palming violation.”
- In the cases of Loeffler and Perdue, they were caught up in a flurry of insider trading allegations last spring after the Senate received closed briefings that outlined the seriousness of the coronavirus.
- Ethics’ membership is handpicked by party leadership, and the panel largely operates in secret, issuing few public records about its cases. That thwarts independent verification of the extent of the committee’s review or how it reached its determinations. Congressional watchdogs and ethics experts, critical of the secrecy surrounding the committee’s work, have been pushing for years for a more independent and open process that will help restore trust in Congress.
- “We have a fox guarding the henhouse situation when it comes to the Congress looking into its own members,” said Beth Rotman, national director of money in politics & ethics with Common Cause, one of the groups that filed the complaint against Loeffler. “It’s a huge problem.”
- “The whole point of the committee as I saw it and all of us saw it was to keep people out of trouble by giving them advice before they did something they would regret,” said former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who led the committee for nearly a decade before retiring in 2017. In the “rarest of circumstances,” the California Democrat added, the committee would refer cases to the Justice Department if it believed a serious criminal violation may have occurred.
- In Perdue’s case, the allegations and the scope of the Ethics Committee’s review are less clear. His campaign will not provide a copy of his dismissal letter, which it said was issued on June 16 —the same day as Loeffler’s dismissal letter. It provided a two sentence quote from the letter, which says the committee found no evidence that federal laws, ethics rules or standards were violated.
- Questions surrounding Perdue’s stock trades have intensified in recent weeks after a series of news reports have highlighted his aggressive investment practices while in the Senate.
- The Perdue campaign has answered with an ad rolled out a week ago that stated the senator was “totally exonerated” following investigations by the Senate Ethics Committee, SEC and DOJ.
- But the recent news reports have expanded the scope of questions surrounding Perdue’s stock trades beyond those he made as the pandemic was taking hold earlier this year.
- The New York Times reported last week that Perdue, a former CEO, conducted 2,596 stock trades since taking office six years ago. That makes him the most prolific stock trader in the Senate. The Times and other articles have noted that some trades involved companies in industries for which he has oversight duties as a senator.
- A separate Times article published in November shed new light on the Justice Department investigation earlier this year into Perdue’s trades, showing that the inquiry was far more involved than previously had been known.
- The report also undermined claims Perdue had been making for months that his day-to-day trading was handled by an outside adviser, without his input. Perdue, The Times reported, had direct input with his adviser into a stock trade he made early this year involving Atlanta-based Cardlytics, where Perdue had been a board member before being elected to the Senate.
- Perdue contacted his wealth manager at Goldman Sachs to sell Cardlytics stock, resulting in a Jan. 23 trade worth between $1 million and $5 million, according to The Times. Six weeks later, the company’s stock cratered after an executive shakeup at the company was announced, and Perdue bought shares back at a bargain price. The stock has quadrupled in value since then.
- The Justice Department probe included questions about whether Perdue had insider knowledge of material information at the company. The FBI interviewed Perdue in June. After a grand jury subpoena produced hundreds of pages of documents and emails, the Justice Department concluded its investigation sometime over the summer without filing charges, according to The Times.
- It’s unclear from the public record the extent to which the Senate Ethics Committee review examined the Cardlytics trade, although a campaign spokesman said it was part of the review.
- Richard W. Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor and securities fraud expert who served as a chief ethics lawyer in George W. Bush’s White House, said the Ethics Committee is not equipped to investigate or monitor complex inside trading issues.
- “It looks terrible,” he said. “You’re receiving all kinds of non-public information in your job as a member of Congress and you’re trading all these stocks.”
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