Corruption? 15 Lawmakers with Key Defense Policy Roles Have Financial Ties to Defense Contractors

Much has been made of Nancy “Diamond Hands” Pelosi and her stock trading ability. From her husband’s stock trades in companies like Tesla and Microsoft, she’s been able to make quite the pretty penny during her time in office, with a suspicious number of the companies she has invested in having something to do with government regulations or policies. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Unfortunately, Nancy is far from the only politician to have suspicious financial ties to certain companies with which the government does quite a bit of business.

In fact, according to a highly concerning response from Business Insider, 15 lawmakers who sit on the very committees that control military procurment and policy have close financial ties to defense contractors, companies whose revenue is more or less entirely derived from the bills passed by those very lawmakers!

BI reports that those ties, which totaled over $1 million in 2020, involved both Democrat and Republican lawmakers.

They had ties to a wide range of the high-profile defense contractors that rake in billions from government contracts each year, including Lockheed Martin.  Corp., Boeing Co., Raytheon Technologies Corp., Honeywell, and General Electric.

Some of the highlights from the report are:

• Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee who chairs the House’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee and owns tens of thousands of dollars in GE shares
• Joe Courtney of Connecticut, chair of the House’s Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee
• Mikie Sherill, member of the House Armed Services Committee.
• “The wife of Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, Ritu Khanna, invested up to several hundred thousand dollars in a collection of defense contractor stocks at some point in 2020, including Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, Honeywell, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. Ro Khanna served on the House Armed Services Committee then, as he does now in his third term as a member of Congress.”
• “Rep. Blake Moore, a GOP freshman from Utah, reported owning up to $50,000 worth of stock in Boeing and up to $50,000 in Raytheon shares at the end of 2020“

Those companies already spend millions each year on lobbying, hiring K-street influence peddlers to push this fighter jet, that missile, or some other satellite on lawmakers, promising jobs in a district in exchange for billions of taxpayer dollars. But having a few lawmakers with tens of thousands of dollars invested in the company’s success probably helps quite a bit too, especially when they’re the ones in charge of setting defense policy.

And it’s not just those 15 lawmakers, men and women BI reports as being the ones who “shape defense policy,” that have financial ties to defense contractors. According to the same report, the military-industrial complex is one of the favorite investments for members of Congress, regardless of what committees they sit on.

So, want to know why we spend so much on defense and get so litte, with cost overruns and equipment underperformance being commonplace? Perhaps looking at which lawmakers are invested in these companies would be a good start.

By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Parler and Gettr.