Is it any wonder why people have lost their confidence in politicians? NPR reports on the latest abuse of public trust:

Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., was arrested Wednesday on charges related to insider trading.

A federal grand jury accused the Buffalo-area lawmaker of passing nonpublic information about a biotech company to his son, who traded on the information and passed it along to others.

“Congressman Collins cheated our markets and our justice system,” said Geoff Berman, the interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. “He placed his family and friends above the public good.”

Collins was a director of and a major investor in a biotech company, which failed an important clinical trial in June.  He immediately pass that information to his son Cameron, who passed the information to his fiancée’s dad.

That’s not legal, of course.  Their inside information allowed them to avoid losses over $768,000.

Collins, his son Cameron, and the father of Cameron’s fiancée were all indicted on charges of securities and wire fraud, conspiracy, and lying to investigators.

That’ll put a damper on Thanksgiving dinner.

“The crime that he committed was to tip his son Cameron so that Cameron and a few select others could trade on the news while the investing public remained in the dark,” Berman said.    And it’s exactly why Americans are tired of the D.C. elite getting special treatment because of their insider status.

Image Credit: By Yahoo [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Hat Tip: NPR

About The Author

Mark was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and served as the national coordinator. He left the organization to work more broadly on expanding the self-governance movement beyond the partisan divide. Mark appears regularly on television in outlets as diverse as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, Bloomberg, Fox Business and the BBC. He’s highly sought after for the tea party perspective from print and electronic media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Examiner, Politico and the The Hill. Mark blogs at MarkMeckler.com, and his opinion editorials regularly run in many of the leading political newspapers both on and offline. Mark has a BA in English from San Diego State University and graduated with honors from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1988. He practiced real estate and business law for almost a decade. For the last eleven years of his legal career he specialized in Internet advertising law. When not fighting for the future of our nation, Mark is an avid horseman, and lives in rural northern California with his wife Patty and two children.

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