of abortion in america. the pro-life wish to say look at the cost of abortion. she never had an abortion. she is a fascinating testimony to is the cost of adoption. she struggled enormously, emotionally with what it meant to relinquish her three children. >> joshua prager and his book "the family wrote. >> you can listen to all of our podcast on our c-span now app. with us, the deputy washington bureau chief with insider and here to talk about his investigation and reporting on the finances of members of congress. "conflicted congress, key findings from insider's five-month investigation into federal lawmakers' personal

finances." thank you for joining us. what prompted your investigation? guest: really, the 22nd history is going back about 10 years when congress passed a law called the stock act, this was a very bipartisan law passed by barack obama, passed by congress. it was supposed to be a bulwark against conflicts of interest. it was supposed to be a defense against corruption in congress when it came to the personal finances of lawmakers on capitol hill and throughout the government writ large. 10 years on we wanted to do an exploration of whether the law was working. there was lots of anecdotal evidence in applications that it was not for example in 2020, we saw the cases of several

lawmakers, former senator kelly loeffler, richard byrd, dianne feinstein who got crosswise with this law, whose stock trades were very much called into question, and in our reporting in insider, epic sought -- epic -- episodically, we found numerous examples of lawmakers who seem to be at best operating with indifference towards this law. they were not for example disclosing their stock trades as they had to be at this stock act, in a timely fashion, so instead of having to disclose them or instead of disclosing them within a rapid period of time, they are weeks or months in some extreme cases, years later. we decided this summer to take a very deep dive into all of the different facets of this issue and that is how conflicted congress came into fruition. host: typically who is

responsible for making the reporting known or is that up to the individual member to have their accountant or financial advisor make that report known? guest: the buck stops with the member him or herself, the law does not say anything about staffers or financial advisors or brokers or family members ultimately it is the responsibility of the house member or senator to make sure that these reports are filed. the reality is that many of them as they make their financial trades, as they buy and sell stock or other types of assets they have somebody either involved with the process, or doing that on their behalf, but when we reached out to many, literally hundreds of members of congress to discuss this issue, we got a whole variety of answers as to why ultimately they were not complying with the law or had trouble. a lot of it was yes, it is my stockbroker or financial advisor's fault, and some were

pleading ignorant saying that we did not know the rules or understand them and was not aware of it. which i suppose is all fine and well, but there might be some viewers saying, yes. if i am speeding and i said i was not aware of the speed limit i did not know i was going 45 in a 30, that is not exactly going to wash when it comes to paying the ticket. ultimately, we found that the stock act is inconsistently followed. the penalties that exist for violating it in one form or fashion are very inconsistent -- inconsistently applied and in some cases not at all. in essence we have a situation where congress is making its own rules for itself. it would be like having a hockey game where the teams had no referees and had to call their own penalties. you can imagine how that situation would ultimately transpire. say for very extreme cases where you might have something that is

tantamount to rank criminality, at least a civil enforcement of the act has left a great deal to be desired based on the reporting we have done. host: as you pointed out it was signed by president obama in 2012. it outlaws insider trading by members of congress and staff, and mandates increased levels of financial transparency and reporting. ironically, does that make it easier for you as a reporter for through the freedom of information act anyone else to find that information on stock trades? guest: theoretically, and this information is supposed to be available, clear, and free to the public. u.s. house and u.s. senate both have online databases where you can go and access this information. there is a caveat, and that is a couple of things. number one some of the disclosures that we found are very difficult to make heads or tails of.

they are not consistent, some are handwritten. we have had a few that looks like chicken scratch and it is very difficult to know what they necessarily say. then you have the problem of if these disclosures are being made late or if they are not being made at all, that flies in the face of the notion of transparency. finally, and we have a very detailed, and i would say rollicking first-person story by three of my colleagues who went on this journey of several months up on capitol hill where for senior-level staffers in congress, this information is likewise supposed to be public. these are supposed to be public records about the financial trades that senior-level staffers are making, for example, general councils, chiefs of staff, but the reality of the situation is you quite literally have to go to two offices on capitol hill which sometimes are open, sometimes

are not. you have to go to computer terminals that may or may not be working on any given day, and access the records that way. they are not downloadable, they are very difficult to search, and as a result if you want to get a comprehensive look at what top aides and top-level staffers to members of congress are doing on this is an incredibly laborious process. we did it anyway, it took hundreds of hours to do it comprehensively, and that really speaks to the bottom line of how difficult it is to access. i can only imagine someone in california, texas, or florida once to get access to the -- wants to get access to these records. if you want to do it immediately, you have to go to capitol hill. host: we are talking about financial conflicts of interest among members and senior staff. the reporting of insider on this,1 for republic -- 202-748-8000 for republicans.

free democrats, 202-748-8001. for independents and others is 202-748-8002. you have done quite the service at this graphically robust report at businessinsider.com. "we rated every member on the financial -- they get a green rating, yellow means caution and their actions are borderline. red means danger that a member has multiple issues that could oppose -- expose them to ethical problems. typically among the red, what was the biggest problem? guest: multiple problems. to give you a sense of scope, we have so far found 49 members of congress who to one extent or another have violated the act, where we have found them doing so here in this calendar year. likewise we found 182 senior-level staffers who have

violated the disclosure provisions of the stock act. that information coupled with a variety of other different metrics, you can read the full methodology of the report contributed to the ultimate ranking whether it is green, yellow, or red. for the red, people who fell into the red there is a lucky number 13 of them who fall into the red category. often times it is because the member him or herself had a stock act violation. at least one member if not multiple have had stock act violations. there might be issues with the legibility of their disclosures, white be issues with them refusing to comment publicly on whether they paid a fine. a couple with other information. i should note that one of the factors that we looked at was whether members of congress had created a qualified blind trust, and effectively that is a vehicle that they can put their personal financial interest in.

it is banded -- managed by a trustee and approved by the senate or house ethics committee. as a result, it is something that congress deems to be the kind of highest and best vehicle for avoiding and preventing conflicts of interest where the member him or herself literally has no contact with his or her own money, they do not control it, they cannot tell the trustee what to do. they have it even more than at arms length. we only found examples of one dozen members of congress who have gone through the official formal process of creating a blind trust of this sort and so, you can take that for what it is, it speaks for itself. it is a time-consuming process and expensive but most numbers have not decided to go that path. host: looking at the report the viewers can see a visual look at the house and senate floor and members rated in the three ways and they can also search by member or by state, and just

randomly picking among the 14 that you have the -- 14 that you have listed inrepresentative cr. this member of congress ratings is computed from six metrics. jacobs of new york, 12 light disclosures. violated the stock act 12 times. $356,000. the member refused to comment or didn't respond when asked about paying applicable fines. typically what are the fines and the civil penalties? >> congress has set it up in a way where the fines are animal. -- minimal. some number into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of the value of the different trades that are being made. when i say trades, i mean stocks like anyone could trade.

it might be very esoteric stocks that people might not know about. not only do some of them in terms of the value into the six figures but in a few cases if don to the seven or eight figures. we are not talking necessarily about small change here. we did find some cases worth hundreds of dollars. host: question for you, dave levinthal. actions the predate the law. >> we talked about the history of this going back to the years that predated it.

there was in a free-for-all going on where the notion of insider trading in congress. that is acting financially on information that they would be privy to as a member of congress. that was happening in a notable way prior to the stock act being passed in the stock act was in a way of response to that type of activity. and prevent stuff like that from happening again. host: in oklahoma, republican line. you are on. go ahead. >> the problem will never get fixed until it gets turned around, the employees demand that they be able to give themselves pay raises even if their performance is bad. there's no reviews of that

performance. they demand perks with no accountability. they act like they are royalty and those employees are the politicians. the citizens should demand performance transparency, term limits. all politicians with harsh punishments because how do politicians wind up being multimillionaires. the citizens are not the servants, but we are talked down to by pelosi and a lot of them like we are their servants. host: dave levinthal. >> if you read the first amendment along with the freedom of speech and religion as the right to assemble. the freedom to petition your

government for a redress of grievances. so on this issue if you want to make your concerns known to your lawmaker, everyone in america fundamentally has that right. we have gotten the question in response to readers who have asked, republicans must be doing this more than democrats or democrats must be doing this more than republicans. and i know that we like in this country so often to put things in a red bucket lou bucket. left versus right. conservative versus liberal. based on reporting, this is a truly unabashedly bipartisan phenomenon. there are multiple examples of democrats engaging in the type of activity that we report on. alterable republicans. nobody seems to really want to address the core foundational issue which is is this law

working. our members of congress abiding by it. and our staffers abiding by it as well. so there's a number of different elements that factor into the question is congress living up to the rules of the road that it created for itself and the answer in many cases appears to be they are not. host: is there any oversight on it? >> most notably congress itself. that's where the action really takes place. 95% of the enforcement of the stock act and the application of the stock act to members of congress is happening internally. it's a bad parallel but i will use it anyway. it is like the internal investigation department and a police force where there is internal action taking place to

determine whether the officers in a police force are doing the right thing. congress has the ethics committee also serve an important function. there's not a great deal of transparency into the process and we have asked dozens and dozens of people probably hundreds of questions for the past year about the process of who is responsible and very few people want to talk or provide any real information about it. we filed a freedom of information act to determine if members of congress were saving checks to pay their fines. the law stipulates that you have to pay a fine to the u.s. treasury.

they came back with no responsive records. it didn't provide us and the public after that and ability to have a window into whether lawmakers are actually doing with the losses they need to do. host: todd on the independent line. caller: you called it a bipartisan phenomenon. i would like to stop eating politically correct and call it like it really is. it's called greed. these guys get in office and a couple years later they are multimillionaires. the people are getting tired of this. i'm on social security. i use the v.a. for all my medical needs and i'm really

angry. and people are getting angry. that is the problem. the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. a fraction of the top 1% are the ones paying these guys off. the only time in history when there's ever been any real change in society has come to violent revolution. i would like to see some guys from rt america on this show like jesse ventura or rick sanchez. and start hearing the truth about what's really going on. host: some specifics on the findings in terms of the conflicts that members have. have you found stocks related to the work they do on capitol hill including obviously the covid pandemic. what do you find?

>> i should note when the stock act was first passed there was originally language in that bill that would have banned members of congress from making individual stock trades so they couldn't trade in the company's stock. many of these companies spend millions every year to lobby the federal government including members of congress and staff and also to have hundreds of contracts at stake because of the decision congress has been making. that is the big concern that was being addressed by the stock act. flash forward 10 years and we found evidence of 75 members of congress at least in 2020 or buying, selling or holding stock

in highly covid-19 pandemic centric sensitive stocks like moderna, pfizer and johnson & johnson. also to other companies that make and sell and trade in ppe. protective equipment masks and also do covid tests as well. there was definitely a time when members of congress were making very critical decisions that affected the entire nation on all sorts of matters related to the covid-19 pandemic. they had a personal financial stake in the companies who are going to be wildly affected by those decisions being made. likewise we oftentimes hear members of congress talk about the media, social media, facebook. facebook i bring up by name because we found at least 30 members of congress who

themselves by and settle facebook stock and some of them are very outspoken.

eventually we can eliminate the, but when you have got crooked politicians, what do you expect? i will never vote again. i would not waste my time. host: thoughts? guest -- guest: the caller spoke to the state level.

there are different sets of rules at the state level that applied to different set of interests across the country. some of those are extremely different ones to the next, and in essence, you have 50 systems to deal with the same issues the state-by-state, so good point that you also need to look at, even though our project does not address it, action in statehouses. the same could be said at the municipal or county level. tons of elected officials operated at those levels to trade stocks, have various financial interests that may be of great interest to their constituents who put them there could also tell you anecdotally that the system in new york city is different than houston, chicago los angeles -- chicago, los angeles or be it where it may.

that is something officials arguing with, local news would encourage them to look into this for their own localities and certainly siddons -- citizens in those jurisdictions need to be aware this is also a thing at the local level. host: it is worth pointing out the numbers of your findings. again, your ratings. the total numbers in terms of solid, meaning compliance with the act. the democratic line, 214 solid, 17 borderline, five endanger. republican, 192 solid green, 60 to borderline, eight in the danger rating. the two independents, one solid, the other borderline. do those numbers surprise you at all? about what you expected? guest: they did not because in the reporting leading up to the

project, we had seen how republicans and democrats were for, in one way or another, finding themselves in -- finding themselves in hot water, so the numbers are not 50-50, but as you can see, they are close. it is ballpark and no one sighed is completely green and the other red. it is an almost even mixture of partisan considerations when it comes to conflicts and financial transparency and the items and metrics we measure as part of the index that we publish host: a couple calls coming. we will show you some of the ratings of members of kentucky. we go to rick on the independent line. go ahead.

caller: i was wondering if you had any information on people in and connected to the white house and the democrats in the house and senate, any information on their financial interests in the solar panel and windmill industries. thank you. guest: what are stories looks at a related issue, specifically looks at democrats who are barely -- who are very highly rated by organizations such as the league of conservation voters, but yet we found evidence of those members buying and selling, trading in, holding stocks for oil companies, exxon, chevron, conoco phillips, in addition to power companies with an energy portfolio that is