A congressman from Santa Clarita has been accused of selling tens of thousands of dollars worth of stock before his committee released a report that drove that stock price down, then failing to report the transaction.
In 2020, U.S. Rep. Mike Garcia sold up to $50,000 in Boeing stock just weeks before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure “released the damning results of its investigation into deadly crashes involving the company’s 737 Max airliner,” as reported by the Daily Beast.
That transaction was not disclosed until Nov. 23, 2020, “more than two months after the 45-day reporting window had closed,” according to the Daily Beast.
That timing is important, the Republican congressman should have reported the stock sale before the 2020 election. Instead, he waited until after votes were cast in an election he won by only 333 votes.
“There’s a chance he’s in Congress today because he hid this,” said Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “And it raises the question of whether he’s looking out for his constituents or is he just trying to enrich himself.”
In response, Garcia’s spokesman Liam Anderson called the story “a desperate attempt to resurrect a previously failed partisan attack – three years after the fact – from a hyper-partisan publication.”
“The fact is Congressman Garcia started to divest from companies as soon as he was elected in May 2020, and, as a newly-elected Member of the minority, he had no insight to the Democrat-written and controlled report in reference,” Anderson said in a statement. “Congressman Garcia immediately rectified the accidental late filing. Everything is filed and everything is public. People are sick of these blatant lies and see right through these lazy attempts to smear their political opponents.”