year. >> schweizer: we need to find out whether they're part of a blind trust or not. >> kroft: peter schweizerongressional leaders should have their stock funds in blind trusts. >> schweizer: whether it's $15,000 or $150,000, the principle, in my mind, is that it's simply wrong and it shouldn't take place. >> kroft: but there is a long history of self-dealing in washington, and it doesn't always involve stock trades. congressmen and senators also seem to have a special knack for land and real estate deals. when illinois congressman dennis hastert became speaker of the house in 1999, he was worth a few hundred thousand dollars. he left the job eight years later a multi-millionaire. >> jan strasma: the road that hastert wants to build will go through these farm fields right here. >> kroft: in 2005, speaker hastert got a $207 million federal earmark to build the prairie parkway through these cornfields near his home. what jan strasma and his neighbors didn't know was that hastert had also bought some land adjacent to where the highway is supposed to go. >> strasma: and five months after this earm

. >> we had earlier this week on the program peter schweizer and he wrote the book and says throw them all out. and he describes in the book all the millions of dollars that congress is making on insider trading. for any one of us out here, if we are involved with insider afraiding we go to jail. it's legal for congress. or the initial public offerings nancy pelosi got, and solyndra, the green energy scam. why aren't these very same people that are against crony capitalism, against the billions of dollars that these guys are wasting and the millions they are making for themselves? where is the anger against them? >> right. well for shame they are not angry at what is going on. what is going on in our country right now is very, very significant, it's very important. it's much more important than the distractions that the media and barack obama and his coneys want americans to engage in, distractions in terms of gaffes or mistakes or potential the presidents, the candidates in the gop primary have made. what is going on in this country is this recognition finally, though, and a lot of it

peter schweizer points out in congress it is legal to do insider trading. to jail. >> they have done it consistently. the biggest example he gives in the book is when we had the financial crisis in 2008, the secretary of the treasury and bernanki met with a bunch of senators. >> and congressmen. >> and congressmen. he said he we are going to go off the cliff. so what do the senators do? they sell their trades. >> 90 trades in one day by one congressman. >> not good. >> and our own senator of rhoded road -- rhode island traded the next day. we should have them pick up the phone every night and say what they learned from congress, call the general treasure where they live and say by this stock. >> they should not be able to trade on anything that they are overseeing at all. >> let me give you an example. nancy pelosi is getting ip os that hedge fund people can't get because of his position, and john kerry is writing healthcare legislation and investing in people who would be the beneficiary of his own legislation. >> it happens on both sides of the isle, and

joining me is best selling author, peter schweizer. this book blew me away.watch martha stewart. i like the way she handled her case. she sucked it up, went to jail, and went on with her life. that was insider trading. a relatively small sum of money. >> right. >> you are saying that everybody else in the country if they do it they go to jail, but congressmen, senators, it's legal. >> right. >> insider trading is legal. >> yes. >> so if you have information about a drug company that's going to be affected by medicare and you are a senator, you can trade on that information. >> john kerry. >> in the case of john kerry there's evidence it happened. in the healthcare debate there was a massive trading of stocks by all sorts of people and they did quite well. that's the problem, the way the laws have been designed and set up, they don't consider private information they hear behind closed doors to be nonpublic information, which is a ridiculous standard. >> let's go through some of the examples. forks we are all worried the crash, the fall of 2008, just before th

the title of the book, "throw them all out" by hoover institution fellow peter schweizer.ok was picked up in a profile on "60 minutes" and detailed the members of congress who indulge in what is basically insider trading. now, it's a bipartisan epidemic. members of both parties, including, allegedly speaker john boehner and nancy pelosi. but here's the thing, it's entirely legal. that's right. and by the way, some of these folks deny doing this. but this is entirely legal. what sent martha stewart to the pokey, what would send you to prison, is legal if you're a member of congress. that's why this is an old political play, but it's no to less disgusting. it's called honest graft. back in 1905, george washington plunkitt said, "there's an honest graft, i'm tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place, i go to that place and i buy up all the land i can in the neighborhood. then, it's all perfectly honest. you charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? of course, it is. well, that's honest graft." that's our political

peter schweizer joins me right now. se of the supercommittee. because of the interview between the two of us, we start working on this book. you assemble your team of eight researchers. you wanted to know why some members of congress, they have left congress with deeper pockets than when they arrived in d.c. and so you found that the insider trading law that applies to you and to me, doesn't apply to them. please explain. >> they will operate on another set of rule. they are free to -- if they get sensitive information from the food and drug administration, something that is happening with the economy, something in a bill related to health care, and they are free and there have been studies done, brooke, that show that u.s. senators are better investors. i'll put that in quotation marks, than hedge funds which guarantee 8% a year. u.s. markets beat by 12% a year. and there's plenty of examples of how they do this. >> well, let's give an example. that's why we have you on. one example that you cite is that you're sitting

. >>> "60 minutes" based its report on the report of peter schweizer foundation. >> hi news book is them all out: how politicians and their friends get rich off insider stock tips, land deals and cronyism that would send the rest of us to prison." great to have you with us, peter. good morning. >> great to be here. >> i've seen statistics that a third of senators, half of the house members are actively trading stocks right now. how widespread do you think this insider trading in congress is? >> i think it's hard to know because the disclosure requirements are so minimal. i think the answer is we don't know. what we do know there have been studies done that show u.s. senators are actually better stock pickers than hedge fund managers and i think you either have to come to the conclusion that they are a lot smarter than we think they are or something is afoot. i think the temptation is going to exist there, because it's legal for them to do. they are the only class of people in the entire country that are allowed to engage in insider trading and not violate their law. >> i wonder if there

in the "60 minutes," steve kroft sat down with peter schweizer who found some red flags in the financial disclosure forms of members of congress. >> the fact is if you sit on a health care committee and you know that medicare, for example, is considering not reimbursing for certain drug, that is market moving information and if you can trade stock off of that information and do so legally, that's a great profit-making opportunity and that sort of behavior goes. >> reporter: the story prompted massachusetts republican senator scott brown to introduce the stock act, a bill to prohibit insider trading by members of congress and the people who work for them. >> if we have people dealing in sense sieve information they shouldn't take the information and line their pockets with money. >> reporter: a version of the bill was first introduced in the house seven years ago by former washington state representative brian baird. >> how many cosponsors did you get? >> i think we go to six. >> reporter: six doesn't sound like a very big amount. >> it's not, steve. you could have national cherry pie and

. >>> "60 minutes" based its report on the research of peter schweizer, a conservative think tank at stanford university. >> his new book is called "throw them all out: how politicians and their friends get rich off insider stock tips, land deals and cronyism that would send the rest of us to prison. its good morning, peter. >> it's good to be here. >> i heard a third of the house members are actively trading stocks. how widespread do you think this insider trading is? >> i think it's hard to know because the disclosure requirements are so minimal. we do know there have been studies done that show that u.s. senators are actually better stock pickers than hedge fund managers. i think you have to come to the conclusion that they're a lot smarter than we think they are or something is afoot. so i think the temptation will exist there because it's legal for them to do it. they're the only class of people in the entire country that are allowed to engage in insider trading and not violate the law. >> i wonder if there's an index fund based on the stocks that congress buys. so the book is c