Multiple Democratic politicians managed to dump their stocks in First Republic Bank right before the bank collapsed. This timing is incredibly suspicious and deserves to be investigated properly. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Multiple Democratic politicians managed to dump their stocks in the First Republic Bank right before the bank collapsed. This timing is incredibly suspicious and by God it needs to be investigated. I mean, come on. Okay. You’ve got the bank failing. You have Congress that is already looking into the whole Silicon Valley problem and the banking industry before this happens. Right? Some of the people involved that were dumping their stock, were involved in those investigations. And now March 15th, was it March 15th, important day, they all start dumping their stock. Come on.
Farron Cousins: It’s really sad too, especially because, well this is just kind of proof how we call the balls and strikes even when it’s against people that we really like. And Ro Khanna is somebody who I really like, but he is one of these five individuals along with, it’s Lois Frankel, Ro Khanna, John Curtis, who’s the only Republican in here, Earl Blumenauer, Dan Goldman and those are the ones that we know of.
Mike Papantonio: Let’s put, we’ll put ’em up on screen for the viewers to see.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And it is sad, but Khanna does maintain, you know, look, I don’t trade the stocks. My wife has it all. Yeah, but you’re doing the trades or somebody for you is doing the trades while everybody else is doing the trades in a bank you know is about to fail. There’s no way. I mean, you cannot convince me these people did not have this insider information.
Mike Papantonio: No. And it’s hard for both of us because we both go, we support Ro Khanna all the time.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: But our job is not to be cheerleader for Democrats or Ro Khanna or the Republicans or anybody. We gotta call it like it is. He was involved. I wish he hadn’t been. I’m not convinced, I’m not convinced of the story that I’m hearing that a lot of times, here the reasons are, well we didn’t know, we weren’t responsible. It was a blind trust. Someone else made that decision for us. Nonsense. Nonsense. Some of these people are involved in the very committees that said Silicon Valley banking is in trouble. We gotta get ahead of this. And so they start selling their stock. And of course Nancy Pelosi again, she’s the one that has prevented, absolutely prevented from any type of reform in that area that says, you may not do it. Don’t give me any excuses, you may not do it. Period.
Farron Cousins: You know what’s interesting is right now there is bipartisan legislation working its way through the House to actually ban stock trading for members of Congress and any of their family members. Do you know who the two co-sponsors of that together are? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Matt Gaetz.
Mike Papantonio: No kidding.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. I mean, the weirdest pairing you could imagine.
Mike Papantonio: Wow. Okay.
Farron Cousins: But there is still room occasionally to actually work across the aisle even with people, I mean, those two have been at each other, you know, like cats and dogs.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: But even they can find common ground to be like, listen, we’re working among people that are skirting the law here. Let’s fix it.
Mike Papantonio: That’s downright weird, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It is.
Mike Papantonio: Okay.
