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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, recently bought up to $5 million in a computer chip company just days before Congress is set to vote on a bill that would boost the chip manufacturing industry, according to the Daily Caller.
Nancy Pelosi’s disclosure revealed on Thursday that her husband spent between $1 million to $5 million to purchase 20,000 shares of Nvidia, a multinational corporation that designs and manufactures graphics processors and relies strongly on semiconductors, the Daily Caller reported.
The multi-million-dollar purchase has attracted speculation about whether Paul has insight into upcoming legislation that may benefit the industry. Reuters reported that the Senate is considering voting on a bill boosting the U.S. semiconductor industry this week.
In February, the House passed the America COMPETES Act, allocating $52 billion to boost semiconductor chip production and $45 billion to support supply chains to compete with China’s technology and manufacturing, the Washington Examiner reported.
The outlet further stated that the bill is Nancy Pelosi’s version of the Innovation and Competition Act that the Senate passed last year.
“It certainly raises the specter that Paul Pelosi could have access to some insider legislative information,” Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist, told the Daily Caller. “This is the reason why there is a stock trading app that exclusively monitors Paul’s trading activity and then its followers do likewise.”
This is not the first time the speaker has been accused of “insider trading.”
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump slammed Nancy Pelosi saying, “it’s not fair to the rest of this country” to allow her to trade stocks while holding public office after the speaker accumulated almost $30 million from stock transactions in the technology organizations she oversees, as previously reported.
Supporting measures to ban lawmakers from stock trading, President Trump said, “it’s not right,” and “it’s inappropriate,” because she “has insider information.”
