Pelosi Launches Preemptive Strike on New Book; Details Sunday on ‘60 Minutes’

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

With a much-anticipated “60 Minutes” report on congressional insider trading set to air this Sunday night, Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office has launched a preemptive strike against Stanford University Hoover Fellow and Breitbart News editor Peter Schweizer, the author of the new book, Throw Them All Out, upon which the “60 Minutes” report is said to be based.

During a press conference last week, CBS reporter Steve Kroft sent the Beltway buzzing when he asked Rep. Nancy Pelosi how she and her husband landed a highly lucrative initial public offering (IPO) for Visa credit card stock. Pelosi, who appeared visibly shaken by the questions, attempted to dismiss Kroft’s queries and said her record on credit card reform was second to none.

But now, with the “60 Minutes” story scheduled to air Sunday night, Pelosi’s office has gone on the attack against Schweizer, a New York Times bestselling author, dismissing him as just a “conservative writer.”

Capitol Hill sources close to the story say Pelosi has good reason to fear Schweizer’s investigative reporting. Throw Them All Out, which hits bookshelves nationwide on Tuesday, reportedly contains a powder keg of original investigative information that suggests Pelosi leveraged her insider status to acquire her highly profitable Visa IPO and then used her congressional authority to shield Visa from disadvantageous legislation.

Developing…

http://biggovernment.com/publius/2011/11/12/373736/?utm_source=like&utm_campaign=ingboo

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Pelosi's investments questioned in CBS report

Washington --

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is the subject of a report on the stock investments of members of Congress that is to air Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes."

The San Francisco Democrat and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, were questioned separately at their weekly news conferences Nov. 3 by reporter Steve Kroft. Neither had granted Kroft's previous requests for interviews.

Kroft asked both leaders about stock transactions they made while Congress was considering legislation that could affect the financial and insurance industries. Pelosi and Boehner vigorously denied any connection.

Laws against insider trading - making stock bets based on information the public doesn't have - do not apply to Congress. Studies have shown that stock portfolios on Capitol Hill outperform the market. Legislation that would ban insider trading by members and staffers has languished.

Kroft asked Pelosi why she and her investor husband, Paul Pelosi, bought an initial public offering of stock in Visa, the San Francisco-based credit card company, in March of 2008.

The same month, former House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., introduced the Credit Card Fair Fee Act, which would have given merchants the power to negotiate lower fees with credit card companies. The bill, hostile to the credit card industry, was passed by the committee but never brought to the floor. Pelosi was speaker at the time, and controlled which legislation came to a vote.

The Pelosis bought the Visa stock in three transactions totaling $1 million to $5 million, according to financial disclosure reports. The first was the IPO, followed by two other purchases of the stock at higher prices, Pelosi said.

Pelosi said the Conyers bill had no chance of being signed by then-President George W. Bush. She said she brought even tougher legislation, the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., to passage after President Obama took office.

Pelosi said the credit card industry spent $3 million in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat Maloney in 2010.

"First of all, what you are contending is not true," Pelosi said at her news briefing last week. "But second of all, we are very proud of our record of what happened."

Kroft asked what was untrue given that the Pelosis had bought the Visa stock two years earlier.

"Well, I have many investments ... I will hold my record in fighting the credit card companies, as a speaker of the House or as a member of Congress, up against anyone." Pelosi said. " We had passed the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights. I don't know what your point is."

Kroft then asked whether there was an appearance of a conflict of interest. "No, it only has the appearance if you decide that you are going to elaborate on a false premise," Pelosi said. "But it is not true, and that is that."

When Kroft said, "I don't understand what part is not true," Pelosi replied, "That I would act upon an investment."

Boehner has adviser

Boehner was asked at his news conference why he traded in insurance industry stock shortly before announcing that a plan for national health insurance was dead. Boehner said a financial adviser makes decisions on day-to-day trading in his investments.

The "60 Minutes" segment follows a flurry of stories about wrongdoing in Washington, including a segment on the program last week by disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who served 3 1/2 years in prison for his 2006 conviction in a lobbying corruption scandal that helped bring down former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas.

Abramoff said he lavished gifts on members of Congress, offered lucrative jobs to their staff and got them to insert opaque legislative language into bills that benefited specific clients. Pelosi promised to "drain the swamp" in Washington when she took control. Abramoff asserted that reforms have been ineffective.

Pelosi's office said "60 Minutes" told her staff that the report was based on a book by conservative writer Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who earlier had accused the Pelosis of hypocrisy for hiring non-union labor at their Napa vineyard.

Labor at the vineyard

A report at the time by ABC's San Francisco affiliate, KGO-TV, found that the Pelosis paid their workers more than union wages and that it would have been illegal for them to encourage unionization.

Several studies have shown that members of Congress and their staffs do better in the stock market than the public. A 2011 study by four university researchers found that a portfolio that mirrored stock purchases by House members from 1985 to 2001 beat the market by 6 percent a year. The same authors found that senators beat the market by 12.3 percent from 1993 to 1998.

The Wall Street Journal reported a year ago that in 2008 and 2009 at least 72 congressional aides traded shares of companies that their bosses helped oversee. The staff interviewed included a Pelosi aide who said her husband made the trades based on newspaper reports and that she knew nothing about them.

A bill by Reps. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., and Tim Walz, D-Minn. called the STOCK Act, or Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, would ban members of Congress and staff from insider trading. The legislation, which Pelosi supports, was first introduced in 2006 and has gone nowhere.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/11/MNPA1LTOJK.DTL#ixzz1dXfUkhIW

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Congress insiders: Above the law?

(CBS News) Martha Stewart went to jail for it. Hedge fund honcho Raj Rajaratnam was fined $92 million and will go to jail for years for it. But members of Congress can do the same thing -use non-public information to make stock trades -- and there's no law against it. Steve Kroft reports on how America's lawmakers can legally make tidy profits on information only they know, simply because they won't pass a law against themselves. The report will be broadcast on Sunday, Nov. 13 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Among the revelations in Kroft's report:

* Members of Congress have bought stock in companies while laws that could affect those companies were being debated in the House or Senate.

* At least one representative made significant stock purchases the day after he and other members of Congress attended a secret meeting in September 2008, where the Fed chair and the treasury secretary informed them of the imminent global economic meltdown. The meeting was so confidential that cell phones and other digital devices were confiscated before it began.

If senators and representatives are using non-public information to win in the market, it's all legal says Peter Schweizer, who works for the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank. He has been examining these issues for some time and has written about them in a book, "Throw them All Out." "[insider trading laws] apply to corporate executives, to Americans...If you are a member of Congress, those laws are deemed not to apply," he tells Kroft. "It's really the way the rules have been defined...[lawmakers]have conveniently written them in such a way as they don't apply to themselves," says Schweizer.

Efforts to make such insider trading off limits to Washington's lawmakers have never been able to get traction.

Former Rep. Brian Baird says he spent half of his 12 years in Congress trying to get co-sponsors for a bill that would ban insider trading in Congress and also set some rules up to govern conflicts of interest. In 2004, he and Rep. Louise Slaughter introduced the "Stock Act" to stop the insider trading. How far did they get? "We didn't get anywhere. Just flat died," he tells Kroft. He managed to get just six co-sponsors from a membership of over 400 representatives. "It doesn't sound like a lot," says Kroft. "It's not Steve. You could have Cherry Pie Week and get 100 co-sponsors," says Baird.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57323221/congress-insiders-above-the-law/

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

That's one 60 Minutes episode I'm not going to miss. This should be a good one.

[Pooky 3,794]

Anyone here surprised that Washington looks after itself any way it can?

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

As usual, "60 Minutes" was a complete waste of time. Let's see what happens when the book comes out tomorrow.

[TBoneTX 45,361]

Laws against insider trading - making stock bets based on information the public doesn't have - do not apply to Congress.

Instead of the irrelevant and probably worthless Third Amendment that we have now, we would've done better to have one that says "Every law passed by Congress shall immediately and completely apply to all members of Congress."

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

http://news.yahoo.com/visas-courtship-nancy-pelosi-032100907.html

Visa's Courtship of Nancy Pelosi

By Daniel Stone | The Daily Beast – 13 hrs ago

Visa has long bragged about its rewards program for consumers. So when its lucrative swipe fees got caught in the congressional crosshairs a few years back, the credit-card giant developed a special program for then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to feel its influence.

The lobbying campaign, reconstructed by Newsweek through interviews and documents, speaks volumes about the efforts of big business to curry favor, even among perceived enemies. It also shows how such efforts can personally and politically benefit politicians, even ones like Pelosi who set out to suffocate the “culture of corruption” in Washington or ultimately didn’t give Visa what it wanted.

The tale begins in 2007, when the credit-card industry became concerned that the new Democrats who took charge of Congress after the 2006 elections were intent on passing legislation to curtail credit-card swipe fees to vendors, which were worth billions of dollars in revenues in the industry, and to create new protections for consumers.

Visa had never been particularly close to Pelosi, a frequent critic of the financial industry, even though the credit-card giant’s headquarters were in her hometown of San Francisco.

But the army of lobbyists Visa assembled—it had a total of 14 lobbying firms at its disposal—set out to try to woo Pelosi with a strategic campaign, hoping to forestall action on any credit-card legislation until after the 2008 presidential election.

“Was there a concerted effort to press Pelosi? Yes. It was partly that she was speaker. But also that Visa’s based out [in her district], where she’s from. They were under attack. It was the confluence between her position and when she engaged she would be intense,” says a lobbyist directly familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the press about internal strategy. “We were sitting around the table and decided we needed a concerted effort related to Pelosi. We needed a full-court press.”

The effort began in earnest in late 2007. Ogilvy, one of Visa's outside lobbying firms, picked off one of Pelosi’s government-affairs advisers, Dean Aguillen, who had close ties in the speaker’s office. Aguillen quit the speaker’s team and went to Ogilvy in December 2007. By law he was unable to lobby his former boss for a year, but he immediately registered to lobby Congress on the credit-card issue, offering guidance to other lobbyists on Visa’s team during strategy sessions, according to a lobbyist present in strategy deliberations.

In an interview, Aguillen told Newsweek he worked for Visa on the credit-card-legislation issue and sporadically talked with his former colleagues in Pelosi’s office. “It’s public record that I advocated on behalf of Visa the past few years,” he said. “I didn’t set up a meeting with the speaker directly, but I’ve definitely done some outreach to the House individually. What we did is help Visa build and maintain strong relationships and a strong reputation.”

Aguillen said he didn’t have any lobbying contact the first year after he left Pelosi’s office, but starting in 2009 he did aim to maintain the relationships, and talked about the various issues he was working on.

Asked whether Visa was using his connections for access, he demurred. “This is my first venture into the private sector. I hope that I had done enough that people would find me to be an asset.”

Visa wanted to meet with Pelosi and her top aides to make the case against the swipe fees. That summer Visa’s outgoing CEO, Carl Pascarella, bumped into Pelosi on the street in the San Francisco neighborhood they share, and she arranged for him to contact her Washington office for a meet-and-greet, according to sources families with the encounter.

Around the same time—on July 21, 2008, to be exact—Pelosi’s reelection campaign received a $1,000 donation from Visa’s political-action committee. Two days later, according to Pelosi’s office, the speaker met Pascarella and the incoming Visa chief executive, Joe Saunders, in her Capitol Hill office. The three exchanged pleasantries and no specific legislation was discussed, according to Pelosi’s office.

Aguillen, for his part, also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the first half of 2008.

Separately, Pelosi’s husband, Paul, a major investor in California, got a lucrative phone call—a pre-screen invite in March 2008 to take part in Visa’s $17.9 billion public stock offering, at the time one of the hottest stock offerings in an otherwise soft market. The initial-public-offering price was $44 per share and was limited to institutional investors and a group of specially selected individuals. Almost $18 billion was made available in public stock to preselected investors. Paul Pelosi made the cut.

The top financial institution to handle the sale was Wells Fargo Shareholder Services, a bank where Paul Pelosi, a seasoned investor, held an account. Before the IPO, Pelosi received a call from his financial adviser at Wells Fargo alerting him that he had been approved to purchase Visa stock and, considering the public buzz around the stock, recommending he buy, according to Pelosi’s office.

Paul Pelosi initially bought 5,000 shares at the $44 initial price. Within a couple of days, the shares' value soared to $64. Paul Pelosi purchased 15,000 more shares over the next three months, at much higher prices. The total quantity was valued as high as $5 million, according to the then-speaker’s financial-disclosure form. In late 2008, when the stock market soured, Pelosi sold 1,000 of the first IPO shares for a meager profit of $2,500 to $5,000, records show. He has kept the other 19,000 shares, which now are valued at $95 each.

Nancy Pelosi’s office denies that the meetings, the lobbying, or her husband’s stock purchase had any influence on her legislative actions. Drew Hammill, a spokesman for the Democratic leader, said Paul Pelosi’s finances are kept distinctly separate from the congresswoman’s legislative work, and she complies with all the legal as well as ethical obligations of her position. He also pointed out that Pelosi has repeatedly advocated for legislation the credit-card industry dislikes.

Several bills affecting credit providers snaked through the House in 2008, including one introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) that would have ended the swipe fees, the small percentage that credit companies like Visa charge with every transaction. Another bill by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), affording significant new protection to credit-card holders, passed the House but did not make it through the Senate. Conyers’s legislation passed his House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support on Oct. 3, 2008, the last day lawmakers were in office before leaving to campaign for the election, but was not brought to the floor, which Pelosi controlled as speaker.

Pelosi’s office says she chose not to bring up the swipe-fee bills in 2008 because she did not believe President George W. Bush would sign them into law.

Pelosi tried for consumer protections in 2008, but the next year she put more muscle behind the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, a bill that gave new protections to consumers and was opposed by the credit-card industry. The bill was entirely devoted to preventing consumer exploitation, and swipe fees were not included, a victory of sorts for the industry.

Only after Senate Democratic Whip ####### Durbin of Illinois caught momentum with a bill that would crack down on credit-card companies’ fees in 2009 did the provision eventually make it into law as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

When confronted earlier this month at a press conference about the delay in swipe fees, Pelosi said the House waited to act on the swipe fees until “we had a president that could sign the bill.” Her spokesman Hammill says it is preposterous to think Visa’s lobbying or the stock purchases had any influence on the speaker’s legislative actions.

Edited November 15, 2011 by Why_Me