Rep. Lisa McClain raised eyebrows on Wednesday with a bizarre defense when confronted with allegations of possible insider trading.
Amid a push in Washington for stronger laws to restrict stock purchases and trades by members of Congress and their families, a report from media outlet Sludge found that McClain’s husband purchased $100,000 worth of stock in xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company. The purchase was made as the company was embroiled in scandal over a feature that allowed users of the chatbot Grok to create nonconsensual deepfake pornography, including images of children. Importantly, though, it also came days before the Pentagon said it is deploying Grok throughout the Defense Department, following through on a contract announced in July.
As Sludge notes, “There is no public evidence that McClain received nonpublic information regarding the Pentagon’s decisions involving xAI.” Nonetheless, one might argue that the family of the chairwoman of the House Republican conference being deeply invested in a company doing business with the federal government, over which her party now has control, presents a pretty serious conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of one.
McClain was asked Wednesday during an interview on NewsNation about her husband’s purchase of the nonpublic stocks and what assurance she could offer that no insider trading was at play. Her answer was that her family “100%” had not engaged in insider trading and did not in this case — because if it did, she would have purchased a lot more stock.
“If it was, we wouldn’t have bought $100,000 in shares,” she said. “We would have bought a heck of a lot more.”
Probably not a great idea for any lawmaker to make a suggestion like that to the public, but particularly for McClain, who twice last year violated transparency laws that require members of Congress to disclose their stock purchases. The lawmaker continued her attempted defense by misstating that the interviewer hadn’t mentioned that the purchased stocks were not publicly traded.
Watch the exchange below. Both Democrats and Republicans have been criticized for stock purchases that raised ethical concerns, which is a primary reason there’s movement to strengthen rules on stock trading — even as some Democrats are concerned the proposals don’t go far enough to stop insider trading or eliminate conflicts of interest. That McClain comported herself as she did should hasten the effort to pass such firmer restrictions into law. It seems to be the epitome of self-dealing in Washington for a congressperson to suggest that because an eye-popping purchase wasn’t even more egregious, they surely didn’t engage in insider trading.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
